DM Level Science
Sometimes I wonder what the journalists at the Daily Mail are smoking. Many a time I can see that they write their stories to be populist and written to bring out the base instincts and emotions of their readers. I see no problem with that, they are a commercial company and they do need to make money to pay their staff wages, though that shouldn’t stop everyone laying into them for not educating their readers properly and allowing politicians to govern the country with impunity.
But a few stories are just so wrong that you can’t explain the stupidity of it as being due to making money. This story, a science one so should be easy to use facts, just makes so many mistakes even a 10 year old could have written a better story.
The title is the first thing wrong with this story.
“Cigar-shaped asteroid stronger than ’15 atomic bombs’ whizzes by earth”
How can an asteroid be “stronger” than a bomb. It might have more kinetic energy than 15 nuclear bombs – if it hit the atmosphere and crashed into the earth. At least the journalist, who by the way hides behind the tag of “Daily Mail Reporter”, got the asteroid bit right.
An asteroid as strong as 15 atomic bombs whizzed past earth last night at just ten times the distance of the moon.
The moon’s distance from earth is about 240,000 miles. Ten times that distance is 2.4m miles. We’ll come back to this point a bit later on.
Astronomers first spotted the cigar-shaped rock spinning through space on Monday evening and tracked it.
The star-gazers were baffled by why the asteroid ‘blinked’ at them until they realised that due to is long shape, the darkness came when it rotated slightly out of view.
Thankfully, the 50m long rock that could have destroyed a small country went barely noticed as it passed earth at a distance of some 2,085,321 miles.
So about 50m in size. That’s about the size of the Tunguska event. The energy estimated to have been released in that event which flattened (literaly) hundreds of square miles of Siberian forest has been calculated to be equivalent to a 30 megaton nuclear bomb, or 1000 times The Atomic Bomb (Hiroshima), or a single Amercian bomb or a 1/3 the size of the largest nuclear bomb ever. So 15 times the size of which bomb?
‘Usually, when we see an asteroid strobe on and off like that, it means that the body is elongated and we are viewing it broadside along its long axis first, and then on its narrow end as it rotates,’ Don Yeomans from Nasa told news.com.au.
‘GP59 is approximately 50m long, and we think its period of rotation is about seven-and-a-half minutes. This makes the object’s brightness change every four minutes or so.’
A quote so the reporter couldn’t make a mistake there. You hope, though that hasn’t stopped the Daily Mail in the past.
Nick James, from Chelmsford, Essex, recorded the newly discovered ‘Asteroid 2011 GP59′ on Monday night showing the object hurtling across the screen and blinking on and off.
Hurtling! Wow. That usually means in an uncontrolled manner. I thought asteroids were pretty controlled in their movements through space. They follow the laws of phsyics.
The asteroid, which was recorded with an 11-inch telescope, was around 2,085,321-miles away from Earth – ten times the distance of the moon which is 238,857 miles away.
Something factually correct for once.
It was picked up by astronomers at the Observatorio Astronomico de Mallorca in Andalusia, Spain, who’ve since determined that it’s heading towards us.
So is it heading towards us to crash into earth? Nope, it missed us by millions of miles. Therefore it wasn’t heading towards us, it was passing us by.
Last night, the cosmic rock passed earth at a distance of more than two million miles.
Ok, so you’ve just said the two million miles bit three times already. I think we get the point. In fact I think it’s repeated this many times because in early drafts they got the distance wrong by a factor of ten.
But space experts said there was no need to be concerned as direct hit on earth would be highly unlikely.
‘There is no possibility of the small space rock entering Earth’s atmosphere during this pass or for the foreseeable future,’ Yeoman added.
So we know it passed the earth, that means it’s extremely unlikely to hit the earth. Unless the asteroid has some kind of rocket engine to make it change direction in space and head back to earth that is.
He said that the orbit of the ‘Asteroid 2011 GP59′ could be accurately plotted.
Astronomers have so far recorded around 3,000 asteroids.
The most recent asteroid is five times bigger than one that exploded over Indonesia in October 2009.
According to the New Scientist magazine, the Indonesian asteroid was as powerful as three atomic bombs, roughly making the new Asteroid 2011 GP59 the same strength as 15 bombs.
The Indonesian asteroid or rather meteor is this one. So now we find out the “bomb” being used as the reference point, as always it’s the Hiroshima bomb.
And when we do some simple searching of the authoritative sites we find that the 2m miles was only when it was first spotted. The Daily Mail missed out on the even more sensational news that the asteroid got closer, much closer to the earth. Within 330,000 miles. That’s just out side the orbit of the moon. According the Daily Mail level of writing that would be an impact with the moon!
SBML
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April 18, 2011 at 09:39 -
The Tunguska event is a fascinating story in it’s own right. For those who don’t know in 1908 something exploded in or just over the Siberian forest.
My understanding is that analysis of the soil suggests that what his was a small comet rather than an asteroid thingy, but there are all sorts of theories, including, inevitably, a UFO. What is not beyond doubt is that it went off with a bang in a very similar style to a very big atom bomb (some say may times more powerful than the largest weapon ever made), and if it had hit a city rather than the Siberian forest it would have been Goodnight Vienna for all concerned. I also recall reading that even in London there
was a strange glow in the sky for days after, but I shall have to check that
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event-
April 18, 2011 at 10:30 -
Yup, this gets repeated in ‘Fortean Times’ with regularity, and they always include the bit about visibility of effects as far away as London…
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April 18, 2011 at 09:45 -
It’s not just the Daily Fail, just about all journalists and MSM publications seem to be totally unable to understand or accurately report anything even vaguely scientific or technical, and some even seem to take a sort of snobbish pride in not understanding, or wanting to understand. That, of course, just does a serious disservice to their readers. It’s hard to understand why, because most such information is readily available without much effort, either from the web (OK – dodgy; there’s a lot of rubbish on the net too!) or by ringing one of many organisations and institutions who would be very willing to offer facts and explanations.
“Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.”
“Never believe anything you read in the papers.”
Just a thought – perhaps the Daily Fail are cutting costs by using interns as sub-editors?
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April 18, 2011 at 09:49 -
April 18, 2011 at 09:59 -
Nobody knew what had happened at Tungska because it was so remote. Ultimately an expedition was launched some time later and scientists found a scene of devastation which was identical to the effect of a very large air burst nuclear explosion. Local tribes people who survived were able to describe a huge fire ball in the sky followed by a a colossal blast. My understanding is that soil analysis shows traces of elements consistent with what we know about comets, and also so radiation effects, including animal and plant mutation. Really we could do with another such event over, say, Hampstead
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April 18, 2011 at 10:09 -
This wasn’t really a failed attempt at colonic irrigation on one of John Prescott’s ancestors by an inexperieced practitioner who sparked up a ciggie at just the wrong moment, was it?
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April 18, 2011 at 10:16 -
This, I think , is a helpful hypothesis. I am now reminded of that story of the vet who was evacuating the methane from a bloated cow and then lit up…..BOOM!
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April 18, 2011 at 10:25 -
“they do need to make money to pay their staff wages”… not their primary reason for making money, of course, which would be to maximise profit for their owners, who will not care what is written as long as it sells… and truth and accuracy can sometimes be boring.
As Engineer says; “Just a thought – perhaps the Daily Fail are cutting costs by using interns as sub-editors?” – not just subs, but also reporters, probably someone doing GCSE Media Studies rather than an undergraduate with a science degree, who might need more money for their knowledge and expertise than the DM are willing to pay in their quest for profit.
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April 18, 2011 at 10:32 -
A rock whizzed it’s way passed The Earth
A subject that shouldn’t bring mirth
But described by The Mail
It resembled a whale
Which would splash down in mid-Forth of Firth(artistic licence, that’s how The Mail would spell the inlet…)
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April 18, 2011 at 10:59 -
From what I have seen in the press regarding ‘science’, it appears they have a deliberate policy of being as wrong as possible. The Mail seems to be the worst offender – compare their articles on fukushiima reactors with those of the Register (I’m only using journalist produced articles, not those from science based bodies).
It is almost as if they have an agenda to produce fear in the population. Is it because fear sells papers or some other reason – give everyone something to be afrain of and they won’t look too closely at what is going on, example ‘government ‘cuts’ which are nothing of the sort’.
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April 18, 2011 at 11:39 -
Then you’ll want to read this article too – http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/10431/
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April 18, 2011 at 14:18 -
It only says what any right thinking person already knows.
The BIG question is why all the scare stories – what are they trying to cover up?
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April 18, 2011 at 12:41 -
If the voters hadn’t turfed out the priapic Lembit we’d have had adequate planetary defences by now. We all grew up watching Thunderbirds so we know what’s possible for a few trillion quid. Particle-beam weapons, giant catapults using the world’s knicker elastic, a space mirror made of Bacofoil, high-altitude swans with steel beaks.
This has not been a party political comment on behalf of anyone with a double-barreled name…
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April 18, 2011 at 11:56 -
If that story (non-story?) had really been in the dear old Fail then it would have been in screaming Caps Lock and titled: METEORS CURE BREAST CANCER.
(followed two weeks later by “COMETS CAUSE BALDNESS”).
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April 18, 2011 at 12:06 -
April 18, 2011 at 13:13 -
Livewire sets the bar high, as ever, but here goes:
(with apologies to Sir Henry Newbolt)There’s a breathless hush at the Mail tonight
As NASA’a press release comes in,
An asteroid on a speeding flight,
A near-earth path and a tumbling spin;
Never mind that the thing is far remote
And the earth won’t explode in fire and flame;
It’s disaster that floats our readers’ boat –
Talk it up, talk it up, that’s the Mail’s game. -
April 18, 2011 at 14:05 -
I remember reading something similar to the Tunguska event in a Bill Bryson book, but in Australia, where there was an explosion at Banjawarn sheep station in remote western Australia in 1993 which measured 3.9 on the richter scale.
“Several [people] reported seeing a large fireball streak across the sky and disappear beyond the horizon, followed by a near-blinding burst of light accompanied by a loud blast, a massive seismic ground wave, and a huge red flare that shot into the sky.”
It was theorised that a meteor strike was the likely cause, yet even after a search by air, no evidence of a disturbance was ever found. It’d be interesting to see what the DM made of that.
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April 18, 2011 at 20:11 -
Any report about Climate Change issues IF the asteroid had hit us?
They’ve missed an opportunity for a good 1/2 page of speculation.
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April 18, 2011 at 23:07 -
There’s a proper astronomical article, including a speeded-up animation of the Chelmsford observation, here:
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April 18, 2011 at 23:10 -
Dunno about Climate Change but imagine the effect on house prices.
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