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American Morning
Is Earth at Risk of Colliding with an Asteroid?
Aired January 08, 2002 - 08:45 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: Interesting stuff going on in space to talk about this morning. One was an event too close to comfort. The other was so far away, it's tough to measure at all, something called a brown dwarf, which is a name you are not likely to forget soon. Astronomers knew they existed, but this is the first ever sighting of a brown dwarf. It's bigger than a planet, it's not quite as large as a star, and one can assume it's been around longer than -- well, it's been around a long time.
Joining us now -- you know what they wrote? Been around longer than Dick Clark is what they wrote. Dick's a nice guy. He doesn't need this abuse.
Joining us now from Miami, Jack Horkheimer is the director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and the host of the PBS series "Stargazer."
Let me ask you about this asteroid thing, because I am nervous, right off the top, about this asteroid, 375,000 miles. Should we be worried about this?
JACK HORKHEIMER, MIAMI SPACE PLANETARIUM: Well, we should be worried about the bigger picture. The thing about this is it was less than twice as far away as the moon when it passed by us, and That's still in astronomy called a very, very close call. It should be a wake up call for getting a near-Earth exploration -- a near-Earth asteroid exploration program going a lot stronger than it is. You see, this was discovered in mid-December, only about 2 1/2 weeks ago. So even if we had equipment to go out there and deflect it, we wouldn't have had enough time.
CAFFERTY: Do we have that equipment? I don't mean to interrupt, but what do we do if one of these things is bearing down on earth? I've seen the movie, but, I mean, can we actually do this?
HORKHEIMER: No, we're out of luck. We need about 20 or 30 years to get the equipment to deflect any oncoming asteroid. So one of these is predicted to hit the earth once every 5,000 years. This is about a thousand-foot long asteroid.
CAFFERTY: What would be the effect if it hit us?
HORKHEIMER: Well, it would wipe out a small country. As a British scientist said, it would have been big enough to wipe out France. Now if it had been a French scientist, he probably said it would have been big enough to wipe out England.
CAFFERTY: Yes, I'm sure. Let me ask you about this brown dwarf thing. The first thing I want to know is who came up with the name, because it's absolutely one of my favorite names.
HORKHEIMER: Well, we've been talking about brown dwarfs since the '30s. A brown dwarf it not -- it's bigger than a planet, but not as big as a star. It's what we call a would-be star. Brown dwarfs -- this particular brown dwarf has about 12 times the mass of all the planets in our solar system, and it orbits very close to the star. It's only a little further away than our planet Saturn in relation to this star. This star, Insagita (ph), which can be seen with the naked eye, the star can be seen after sunset tonight in the west, this Dwarf, we've never seen one directly imaged. We've only been able to tell that other planets exist around other stars by observing the gravitational tug on the stars. So this is a monumental first, it's the first time we've ever photographed an object moving around a star other than our own star.
CAFFERTY: How far away is this thing?
HORKHEIMER: About how far away?
CAFFERTY: Yes.
HORKHEIMER: Fifty-eight light years, which is -- it's not a hop, skip and a jump. It's not in our immediate neighborhood. It's pretty far away.
CAFFERTY: Not down the corner, and up your street.
HORKHEIMER: No, but it's...
CAFFERTY: Sixty-eight light years and light travels at 186,000 miles a second, so it takes 68 years for the light at 186 -- yes, that's a good fur piece, as they used to say in Nevada.
HORKHEIMER: Yes, we are seeing that star tonight, we are seeing it as it existed 68 years ago. The fascinating thing is...
CAFFERTY: What does this thing mean? I mean, does it tell us anything profound about the possibility of life? What have we learned from this thing?
HORKHEIMER: What it tells us is that we now have a new generation of telescopes on Earth that are able to actually see objects as big as big planets, a little bit bigger, moving around other stars. It's something I never thought would happen in my lifetime. So now we have the ability to look at other stars and find other huge objects orbiting them. This is a real first in astronomy. It's probably the most important thing that's happened in the past two years in astronomy. We've never seen anything like this in history before.
CAFFERTY: All right, it's interesting. If I had not done this, I think I would have wanted to do what you do. I've always had a kind of interest in astronomy.
We've got to leave it there, Jack. Thanks for being with us.
HORKHEIMER: Keep looking up.
CAFFERTY: OK, Jack Horkheimer, who is the director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium, joining us from Miami.
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