Comet May Have Missed Earth By a Few hundred Kilometers 265
First time accepted submitter afree87 writes "A re-analysis of historical observations at a Mexican observatory suggests Earth narrowly avoided an extinction event just over a hundred years ago. On August 12th and 13th 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation, some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun. This month, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico suggests these were fragments of a comet. 'If they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.'"
Buckshot: (Score:3)
3275 of em. That's a heck of a shotgun blast.
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3275? Not 3276 or 3274?
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He probably works in base 5 himself, and rounded it off to the nice round number 101100 (5), and converted it to decimals for the publication.
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3275? Not 3276 or 3274?
That "missing" one will be hitting in a year or so. :->
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And dodged them all! (Score:2)
Clearly the Earth is a gun-kata black belt.
May have missed ? (Score:4, Funny)
May have missed ? I'm fairly certain it definitely missed.
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It may have been that it was a few hundred kilometers close. Or it may not. Depends on how good the re-analysis of this old data was.
Re:May have missed ? (Score:5, Funny)
Often it's helpful to read the entire sentence, rather than just the first half. You should be OK on these sentences though, as I've structured them to accommodate your particular reading disability.
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I think you may have missed the humorous nature of his post. No, on second thoughts, you definitely missed it.
Re:May have missed ? (Score:5, Funny)
I think you may have missed the humorous nature of his post. No, on second thoughts, you definitely missed it.
That's because, in space, no one can hear you go "whoosh".
Re:May have missed ? (Score:5, Funny)
May have missed ? I'm fairly certain it definitely missed.
Nope - it didn't miss. I was the only survivor as I happened to be exploring some very deep natural caverns at the time.
You are all just figments of my imagination.
Re:May have missed ? (Score:5, Funny)
And Slashdot is the best your imagination can come up with. Come on man.
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I just checked out /b/ ...
Now YOU need counseling as well.
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Bit of a coincidence, but Krakatoa erupted in a series of massive explosions in August 26-27, 1883. These explosions were so loud that they were heard 3000 miles away, and turned an entire mountain completely into ash and smoke.
Krakatoa explosion [wikipedia.org]
A little too early (Score:4, Funny)
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This is Niola "Bleeping" Tesla we are talking about. Of course he is responsible. After doing some mathematical calculations he realized that something destroyed and threw these off course a hundred years ago. So he used his experimental time machine to go back and do it himself to be certain it was done.
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Is Tesla the original Doc Brown?
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I'm waiting to hear how it's global warming or W's fault - at least pin it on the europeans coming to north america if your lack of appreciation for diversity artificially imposes temporal limits on you understanding of causation...
take the spin out of it & what are you left with? SCIENCE?!?
I'm waiting to hear from the fiscal conservatives who want to cancel the space program and asteroid-hunting programs because the Federal Government shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on such useless endeavors.
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I'm waiting to hear from the fiscal conservatives who want to cancel the space program and asteroid-hunting programs because the Federal Government shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on such useless endeavors.
Usually those wingnuts cue a response from the other wingnuts complaining about how many schools we could build with the military budget.
Re:Tesla?!? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm waiting to hear from the fiscal conservatives who want to cancel the space program and asteroid-hunting programs because the Federal Government shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on such useless endeavors.
Most self-proclaimed "conservatives" in Congress usually insist that they want a socialized space program with a central government authority which has exclusive rights for access to space... private companies are neither needed nor wanted except in a support role where cost-plus contracts are handed out to the lobbyist who has schmoozed them with the best campaign contributions. Of course all of this is good because it helps out the local congressional district with billions of dollars of "stimulus money" to help keep local bureaucrats employed.
The "liberal Democrat" answer: privatized spaceflight from companies competing for fixed-price contracts open to competition and demonstrating that they are able to actually accomplish the task before they are awarded any money.
It was former senators William Proxmire and Walter Mondale who were most in favor of cancelling the "space program" in earlier eras. Guess which political party they belonged to, if you don't already know?
No, I don't get space politics either, just don't let your head get warped out on this issue.
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"No, I don't get space politics either"
It's actually very simple now. The primary competency of military-industrial complex is extracting government funding by managing the procurement and political process. This is why you have say NorthroBoeingheed winning all sorts of contracts to perform random technology and other services from the government.
In particular over the last 30 years, the MIC has split their facilities geographically for maximum political coverage, these days usually in the deep-'red' (and
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That's what they want you to think.
Typical Slashdot comments pattern to follow... (Score:5, Insightful)
How Slashdotters approach all scientific articles:
1. Abounding skepticism.
2. Criticism of scientist's findings and methods used.
3. Explanation of failed logic.
4. Loss of all wonder and awe and appreciation at whatever findings remain.
5 Cynicism and dejection at failure of science.
6. Continued existence of misery and woe and greater skepticism.
My tongue is jammed up against my cheek; otherwise, I'd say more. God bless.
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Being extraordinarily skeptical isn't a bad thing, and is part of the scientific method. It IS a good thing.
Extraordinary claims without skepticism isn't science, it is religion.
Re:Typical Slashdot comments pattern to follow... (Score:4, Insightful)
Most Slashdot reactions are not skepticism, they are knee-jerk reactions over information that challenges their vision of things. Actual skepticism would involve attempting to verify claims as opposed to dismissing them outright.
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Insightful comment there.
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Being extraordinarily skeptical isn't a bad thing, and is part of the scientific method. It IS a good thing.
Extraordinary claims without skepticism isn't science, it is religion.
Which is all well and good as soon as everyone can agree on what is and is not extraordinary.
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Actual scepticism is a rare thing on Slashdot. Most of the time, it's just some regurgitated nonsense from someone who didn't even read the article, never mind understood it. Also, your claim "Extraordinary claims without skepticism isn't science, it is religion" is both wrong and moronic.
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Actually, extraordinary claims require the same proof as any other type of claim. The reason I know that is because the scientific method says: 1. Characterize. 2. Hypothesize. 3. Predict. 4. Experiment. If extraordinary claims required extraordinary proof, then it would say: 1. Characterize. 2. Hypothesize. 3. Predict. 4. Experiment. 5. Reject experiment if claim is extraordinary. Or, to put it another way, would it be acceptable if Pope Benedict
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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Actually, extraordinary claims require the same proof as any other type of claim. The reason I know that is because the scientific method says...
It's irrelevant what the scientific method says. You're really reading something into the quote that isn't there. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" isn't a description of proper scientific methodology, it's a commentary on human psychology, and you're badly misreading it if the question occurs, "who determines what's an 'extraordinary' claim", since it's subjective -- it's just a matter of what each individual who hears the claim personally considers extraordinary or not. If you don't fi
How Do You Classify Mine? (Score:3)
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7. "I saw that in Nature or arvix or Science six days ago WTF"
8. "slashdot dupe see yesterday"
9. "Can anyone figure out what the journalist means, or unfilter the journalist stuff to figure out what the subject meant?"
10. "The journalist claims this is new, here is a wikipedia article about the same having been done five times over the past thirty years"
11. Can a work a goatse joke into this somehow? or 1. 2. 3. 4. profit? or In soviet russia, the skepticism abounds you
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c.f. Any /. thread on Hans Reiser, especially after he led that police to Nina's body.
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I believe that was covered under the no balls comment.
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If you're worried about karma points you're doing it wrong.
If you want to be taken seriously (Score:5, Funny)
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As a scientist, don't author your paper [arxiv.org] with the font set to Comic Sans.
But doesn't the term "Comic Sans" roughly mean "Without Humor" or "Not Funny" ?
Sounds perfect for a technical paper.
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Extinction level? (Score:4, Informative)
It would probably have been calamitous but extinction level, maybe not. I mean most of those would probably have landed in the ocean anyway, with maybe a thousand or so dropping on land. The Tunguska event didn't raise too much atmospheric dust or cause much occlusion, and at around 10 megatons might have released in total ten gigatons or so, which is what, twice the total world nuclear arsenal except without fallout.
Apocalypse territory? Certainly. Extinction? Probably not.
Re:Extinction level? (Score:5, Interesting)
My understanding is that a major asteroid strike on the ocean could be catastrophic due to ozone depletion.* It's just a theory (because obviously we haven't tested it), but if true it would indicate that asteroid strikes are a bad thing no matter where they hit.
http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-10-asteroid-ocean-deplete-ozone-layer.html [physorg.com]
* This depends on a single very large asteroid, so a bunch of smaller ones might not be as much of an issue. Unless they're fast moving.
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Intrepid imaginaut says "...except without fallout."
No, certainly no fallout from all the nuclear sites around the world being smashed and broken into little bits. Certainly not.
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Nuclear bombs are designed not to go off except for under very special circumstances.
You are more likely to receive fallout from the nuclear reactors being destroyed, not the bombs.
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All the nuclear sites around the world that existed in 1883? Yeah, lots of fallout from those...
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And while one needle prick won't kill you, three thousand of them will quite likely be problematical.
Look up "nuclear winter". While the more spectacular and lurid claims of the original proponents have been debunked, it's currently believed that a large scale nuclear war will cause significant c
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Oh yeah I mean we'd have been looking at an ice age, most likely, but we survived the last ice age pretty well.
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Most of the problems from objects hitting the ocean are due to ocean wave impulses. Many moderate size objects don't produce huge impulses, one big object would.
The evaporation of a lot of water is a short-term event. It condenses and falls back out of the skies, all done in a week or two. The atmosphere can only hold so much water. Putting a lot of salt into the air may cause some problems; many land plants don't like salty environments.
S.M. Stirlsing;'s Peshawar Lancers (Score:2)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peshawar_Lancers [wikipedia.org]
Long-term implications (Score:5, Interesting)
While we know that in practice actual asteroid and comet strikes on Earth are very rare, this sort of thing helps illustrate how we need to do a good job tracking the larger threats and preparing to deflect them if necessary. The good news is that the WISE mission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wide-field_Infrared_Survey_Explorer [wikipedia.org] has successfully tracked most of the large asteroids that have near-Earth orbits and none of them are threats in the immediate future. There are however other dangers. For example, comets that are no longer outgassing could potentially have very elliptical orbits that would not be detected by WISE. Also, there may be smaller asteroids that WISE has not detected that could make a life pretty unpleasant in a more narrow area even if they don't lead to an extinction event. An asteroid that was around a thousand feet across (300 meters) could devastate a city and could easily escape detection from WISE. Moreover, there are some real worst case scenarios. If such an asteroid landed in either Pakistan or India for example they might think that the other had launched a nuclear weapon at them.
In general, we aren't doing enough to deal with potential existential risks. At this point, we don't know if the Great Filter is in front or behind us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter [wikipedia.org]. The basic idea of the Great Filter is that the easiest explanation of the Fermi Paradox is that there's some set of events that make life unlikely to reach the interstellar level. That could be behind us, if for example life arising is unlikely or multicellular life arising is unlikely. But at least some filtration has to be in front of us. It seems that natural events (like asteroid strikes) are not common enough to be the entire filter. But there are other potential filtration events. Learning more about these issues not only helps preserve humanity it also helps get insight into why we seem to be alone. Unfortunately, funding for these sorts of things is tiny. The WISE mission for example was only $320 million and was used not just for the asteroid work but a lot of other good astronomy for objects both inside our solar system and more distant objects. This is a tiny cost compared to what is spent on non-science issues, and is particularly tiny when one considers it as being paid for almost exclusively by a single country.
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At this point, we don't know if the Great Filter is in front or behind us
I thought the "great filter" was a lot of handwaving to explain away rather unique features required for an "advanced" civilization that can't be remotely detected:
1) Magnetosphere to keep water vapor in the long term and reduce cosmic rays in the short term.
2) Continental arrangement that gives enough ice age action to encourage evolution competition but not completely wipe out lifeforms and once civilization gets rolling to keep temps and sea levels constant for an unusually long geologic time
3) A nice si
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I wish I hadn
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. We've used most of the easily accessible oil and a fair bit of the easily accessible coal, and those resources were necessary to get to our current tech level. If some event sends our tech level back a few thousand years (or possibly even only a few hundred) it may well be that we won't have the resources necessary to return to a technologically advanced situation.
That might turn out to be a feature, rather than a bug. "A few thousand years" is just another blink in time. The over riding problems for humans (and the rest of the planet) is that there are too damned many of us. If you drop the population by a couple of billion, keep it down (the hard part) and reboot the system you might end up with something that lasts longer than the system that we're screwing around with now.
If not, then maybe the NEXT few thousand years will do it. Worked for the Moties, right?
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Are we planning to produce extremely high speed objects in the future? Think anyone else might be able to produce extremely high speed objects? Think they can aim an extremely high speed object at a distant planet?
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I, for one, am much more worried about the idiots running the various nuclear armed states on this planet and their assorted apocolyptic politicians than anything the universe is planning on tossing our way.
Occam's razor and all that.
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For example, comets that are no longer outgassing could potentially have very elliptical orbits that would not be detected by WISE. Also, there may be smaller asteroids that WISE has not detected that could make a life pretty unpleasant in a more narrow area even if they don't lead to an extinction event.
And, unhappily enough, TFA was concerned with said celestial body.
So it's OK to go back to shivering in fear. Besides, US presidential elections are just around the corner (again).
Extraordinary claims req. extraordinary evidence (Score:2)
While it is not impossible that an extinction level event almost happened, I'd like to see a bit more evidence before panicking.
If this comet was so close, so much so that no other observatory on earth was able to see it due to "parallax", how come not one of the 450 or so pieces impacted the earth? (There are no reports of Tunguska sized impacts).
Also, wouldn't it be relatively easy to figure out where this thing was headed and find out where it is now? Unless it was a (very) long period comet or ended u
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Why would you bother panicking in any case?
Sure, if it might happen in the next couple years, might be worth some panic. Last year's near miss? Not even worth a "whew, we dodged that bullet!"....
Note also that it's unlikely that there will EVER be more evidence. This was a sighting from one observatory over 100 years ago. It's moderately unlikely that anyone else noticed it a
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In fact, if it exists, shouldn't it be easy to find as it will likely have an orbit that repeatedly intersects earth's orbit?
Only if its in the same inclination as the earth relative to the sun. Classic orbital mechanics mistake... just because two things are up there (lets say, ISS and HST) doesn't mean they'll ever come really close to each other.
Gravitational slingshot might mean the orbit has been permanently changed. On a long enough scale, from the perspective of small enough objects, there are no non-chaotic orbits. There are Lagrangian points and there is no reason for long term stability there (even the most stable on
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The other issue I have with the story is that if it's disintegrated comet, it had clearly had plenty of time to spread out, as it was "observed" over 2 days. Is it reasonable that it would have spread out to that length (many thousands of kilometers), but still would have remained narrow enough that parallax could be a factor? Wouldn't it at least a thousand kilometer wide? And if so, wouldn't it be visible against the sun over a much wider latitude range?
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My question would be... how is it that a massive comet could pass near earth and nobody see it at night? Shouldn't it have been visible at night a day later as it traveled away?
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Good point. Earth's orbital speed is 100,000 km/h. The moon is only 385km away. Things have got to be just-so for that comet to stay in the same parallax for a whole day if it is closer than the moon.
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AACK. 385,000km away.
Gravity (Score:2)
Seems like the fragments would have been close enough to be affected by Earth's gravity possibly pulling them in closer if they made a return trip. I wonder where they are now.
Oh well (Score:2)
Dammit!
Well, back to the drawing board.
Shit!
Lucifer's Hammer (Score:2)
Hammerfall!!!
They were not comets. (Score:2)
Factor of 1000 error (Score:2)
The referenced article says the fragments were 50-800 km across. An 800km object 600-8000km from earth would not need a telescope! The original article says 46-795m.
Al Qaeda of the Asteroid Nebula Peninsula (Score:2)
I'm thinking no (Score:5, Interesting)
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No, just Bruce Willis.
Re:*shiver* (Score:5, Insightful)
>best not to think of these things
What an idiotic thing to say. Yes, there are people who think about these things and they try to come up with practical solutions. Yeah, let's not think about this. Someone might come up with a way of diverting certain death some day.
>keeping a comet secret in this day and age.
Good luck with that.
There are thousands of amateur astronomers across just the US alone and we've got the internet and everyone would know within hours of discovery anyway.
--
BMO
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Or the guy who does come up with the practical solution will get shot by the raging mob, as his solution seems to not believe in the wrath of God, so therefore he must be working for the devil and should be killed on the spot to get into Gods good graces. I would just post a message on a Tweeter Account about a 1 minute before it is due. Because no one follows me. Ill be on record, but wouldn't cause an sturr.
Re:*shiver* (Score:4, Funny)
Let's go burn down the observatory so this will never happen again!
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Is that a quote from Asimov's "Nightfall"?
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You're thinking way too highbrow. It's from the Simpsons.
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I've actually seen a Christian (maybe I should put quotes around that) call some recent medical breakthrough an "attempt to stay the divine hand of God as expressed through terminal disease." 8-(
Hopefully not too many think like that.
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See dictionary for definition of "humor."
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There are thousands of amateur astronomers across just the US alone and we've got the internet and everyone would know within hours of discovery anyway.
It's not that easy. The speeds and sizes involved typically mean you don't know it's coming till it smacks you in the face.
--
BMO
Guy, this isn't the Post. You don't need to sign, it's right up top in the "headers" - just like it would be with email or on usenet, or on a forum, or anywhere else that's not a letter.
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I dunno man those rocks are pretty random...
Re:*shiver* (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I would, so I could go on TV and say "See? I've been telling you we need to spend more money on space science! But no...! Now we're all screwed because you all wanted another tax cut for your bosses!"
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It wouldn't work. If you think people are that stupid....I mean living this life in this world wouldn't you think after the first address (shameless plagiary from Terry Prattchet) "There is bound to be a HUGE razor-blade in a candyfloss as big as this"?
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Huh? You use a sun filter and you can definitely look at the Sun with a telescope.
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Strikes me that there are a lot of possible interpretations.
The most obvious of which is the joke just whooshed by you.
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And now they're back buying up all 4 million of them this weekend. We're in trouble!
Re:I call BS. (Score:4, Insightful)
"Statistically, there's no way you would still be alive if you were hit by a car every single day. What a lair!"
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Then it is just a very astronomically (pun intended) rare statistical anomaly and thus nothing to ever worry about, (unless you are worried about getting struck by Lightning twice in the same year while riding a unicycle and simultaneously getting hit by a bus within your lifetime, in which case you actually have bigger problems) unless they are trying to say that this happens more common then we think, which is to say are you almost hit by a car everyday?
No?
Then yes. They they may not be lairs, but they ar
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The whole story has very little substantial fact behind it, and factual errors such as pointed out above do not promote confidence.
I bet you're a lot of fun at astronomy parties.