[meteorite-list] In search of the origins of meteor showers and meteorites (Prague)

From: MexicoDoug <MexicoDoug_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Tue Aug 22 17:06:25 2006
Message-ID: <005401c6c62e$b41f8e40$87c85ec8_at_0019110394>

Prague, IAU meteting. Check out the breweries in the IAU's official
exclusive conference tourist program: (
http://www.astronomy2006.com/tourist-program.php ). Luckily most talks are
done twice to allow for "conflicts" at the Prague mtg.

The post conference exclusive IAU tours to Bohemian paradises are even more
picturesque. Sunday's Colloquium is one that would be of special
meteoritic interest: A visit to, Jaromer-Josefov, East Bohemia where - the
mathematician Josefem Morstadtem worked together(?) with Baron von Biela,
the great Austo-German general and astronomer who recovered Comet 3D/Biela
on the night of Feb. 27, 1826 here. (having trouble deciphering Czech: the
credit of the orbit calculation is usually given only to Biela which is why
it was named after him[under today's IAU rules Biela would properly be named
Montaigne's Comet and Messier had detailed observations within days of its
real discovery in March 1772])

This comet was only the third comet to be shown to be periodic (1=Halley,
2=Encke) - and just in time. Comet Biela paved the way as the first comet
deduced to produce a meteor shower. It doesn't end there. I would consider
the clinching of this meteor shower-comet relationship when Yale University
scientists in 1838 including Benjamin Silliman, Jr. et. al. finally placed
the radiant near the sword of Perseus (i.e., near Andromeda). Ben was of
course the son of Benjamin Silliman who was one of those two reputed
Jeffersonian "lyin'" Yankee professors who picked up space rocks and
confirmed the first American fall, at Weston in 1807. And of course, the
huge controversy of Biela's comet ensued in a very logical historical
context: Was the beautiful meteorite that fell in Mazapil, Mexico (1885) at
the tail end of the "exaltations" of falling stars of the Andromedids in
1885 a part of a comet? That arguably is a dead end with hindsight, but was
an earthshattering possibility at the time. It took Fred Whipple in 1950 to
change predominant scientific thought - that is that comets were not
mountain sized piles of meteoroids ("sand bar" or "gravel bank" model), but
rather FROZEN SOLID dirty snowballs. Nininger was an outlier and held out
longest keeping the gravel bank theory...The philosopher Immanuel Kant had
two hundred years earlier predicted that comets contained volatiles which
gave rise to their fuzz and tails near the Sun. Sir Isaac Newton has
considered comets to be small, solid/planetary, though he illustrated them
with a parabolic orbit he had calculated, he did allowed for elliptical
orbits. Aristotle said they weren't planets because their orbits were too
inclined to pass through the zodiac.
.
However, another Newton, by the mid 1800's, who coined the term meteoroid
and looked to meteoroids as the possible building blocks of the universe -
like the atom in a sense - its aggregations, depending on arbitrarily
determined sizes, was the unaltered composition of asteroids, comets and
stars where it was argued that the definitions of these bodies were
arbitrary depending on size cut-offs alone.

When Comet Biela did break up in a major way around 1850 - and was
attributed to the Andromedids meteor shower and newly predicted it was a
true celestial miracle when a true intensive meteor shower of 2000 meteors
per hour a few years later rained upon the earth in 1885. (This particular
one wasn't called a "comet shower" at the time, although...Earth just missed
the Bull's-eye---.

That the Mazapil iron fall eventually made it the Austrian national museum
made it somewhat of a special meteorite there, too, given the ethnicity of
Biela...note: I said recovered by von Biela because this comet had been
observed several times by great astronomers of the 1700 and early 1800's,
but the elliptical, and later, very short period nature wasn't recognized
by the earlier greats in calculations and the nomenclature committee awarded
it to Biela.

Mazapil's history is covered in Beech, M., MPS V. 37 p. 649 (2002).

Excellent spell check comment in Ron's forwarded newsarticle. Maybe
Plutonoid? :-)
star ==> asteroid meteor ==> meteoroid planet ==> planetoid pizza ==>
pizzanoid astronomers ==> astronomersanoid
star ==> asterling meteor ==> meteorling etc. etc. proposed
astronomerlingo

Maybe, "Avoid the Noid"...There's already one Kenneth Lamar Noid out
there... maybe "ling" is the way to go.

Saludos, Doug
Mamas Don't let you Babies Grow up to Be Cowboys...Make them Be Doctors and
Lawyers and Such...Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson

Ron's forwarded newsarticle wrote:
> "Since the term is not in
> the MS Word or the WordPerfect spell checkers, we thought it was not
> that common," Gingerich wrote in an e-mail to news_at_nature.com. The
> geologic definition of the word does appear in common dictionaries,
> including the Oxford English.
Received on Tue 22 Aug 2006 05:05:28 PM PDT