Bad Astronomy. Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the Moon Landing 'Hoax'

Disaster, where he claims that the Earth’s axis would tilt due to the combined pull of the planets, plunging the Earth into an ice age.

Noone was sincere, and felt he had done the research to back up his claims. The problem is, his research involved almost no astronomy at all. He related Bible prophesies, Nostradamus, and even the shape of the Great Pyramid in Egypt to a disaster in the year 2000, and figured the planets must have something to do with it. Yet, in his meandering book precious little space is devoted to the planets, and nowhere — nowhere! — does he talk about the actual measurable effects of the planets.

I am almost willing to give Noone the benefit of the doubt and assume he really was concerned about global catastrophe. But I wonder: if he really felt that the Earth would be destroyed on May 5, 2000, why not give away his book for free so that people could be warned? I can’t imagine he thought the royalties he got on the book would be worth much on May 6.

Noone wasn’t even the first. In the 1980s astronomer John Gribbin and his coauthor Stephen Plagemann wrote an infamous book entitled The Jupiter Effect, which claimed — again, without the benefit of any math — that the gravity of the planets would affect the Sun, causing more solar activity, causing a change in the Earth’s rotation, causing massive earthquakes. This tissue-thin string of suppositions led them to predict very matter-of-factly that Los Angeles would be destroyed in 1982. The book was a runaway best seller.

When, in fact, L.A. was not destroyed as predicted, Gribbin and Plagemann wrote another book called Beyond the Jupiter Effect, making excuses about why things didn’t work out quite as they had predicted, and of course they never simply admitted they were wrong. You may not be surprised to find out that this second book was another best seller. It’s possible, barely, that the first book was a simple mistake and they honestly believed what they preached. The motivation for the second book perhaps isn’t as clear.

If Noone and Gribbin were simply misguided, during the May 2000 alignment the “Survival Center” company was far more deliberate. Peddling disaster nonsense, this company had a web site promoting Noone’s book as well as equipment to help you survive the oncoming onslaught. On their web site (http://www.zyz.com/survivalcenter/echange.html) , they reported,

Some scientists have already reported a distinct increased wobble to the earth as it begins to respond to the gravitational pull of the alignment… predictions [of the results of the alignment] range from a few earthquakes to major earth crust movement (slippage), polar ice cap movement, sea levels rising 100 to 300 feet or more, huge tidal waves, high winds 500 to 2000 miles per hour, earthquakes so massive that Richter 13 or more could be possible, both coasts of USA under water, magnetic shift and much more.

In 1998, I e-mailed them with this question: “May I ask, who are the people making these predictions? I would appreciate being able to contact them so that I may present my arguments on this issue.” They replied, basically informing me that I had my sources and they had theirs. They wouldn’t tell me who their sources or what their credentials were. I’m not surprised; backed up by hard science, no one can truthfully claim that the planets can have any sudden and catastrophic effect on the Earth. I would have serious doubts about the Survival Center’s expertise in this matter anyway, even if they had revealed their sources. My opinion in situations such as these is, “Beware the science of someone trying to sell you something.”

Of course, I’m trying to sell you something as well. But in my case, I’m peddling skepticism. You can go and find this stuff out for yourself if you try hard enough. The math isn’t hard, and the conclusions are, well, conclusive.

My only real complaint about this whole alignment business — besides the vultures preying on people’s fears — is that we weren’t able to see it. The Sun was in the way, completely overwhelming the relatively feeble light from the planets and our Moon. So, not only were we denied the excitement of impending disaster, but also we couldn’t even take a picture of it to show our grandkids! And we’ll have to wait until September of 2040 for the next good alignment. At least that one will be visible at night.

15. Meteors, Meteoroids, and Meteorites, Oh My!: The Impact of Meteors and Asteroids

On December 4, 2000, at roughly 5:00 P.M., something fell out of the sky and landed in David and Donna Ayoub’s backyard in Salisbury, New Hampshire. Witnesses say the object was moving rapidly and glowing hot. When it landed, it set two small fires a couple of meters apart on the Ayoubs’ property. The couple quickly ran outside to put them out.

The event certainly brought a lot of attention to the town. At first, it was a small story in the news section of the local newspaper, the Concord Monitor. However, the story was quickly picked up by an e-mail list sent out to astronomers interested in asteroid, meteor, and comet impacts. Soon the Ayoubs were receiving phone calls and were welcoming news media from all around the world. Everyone wanted to hear about what they saw, and most people assumed it was a meteorite impact.

I was skeptical when I heard the story the next day. I decided to look into this myself, so I phoned several of the witnesses. These people were sincere, and really wanted to know what had happened. After listening to them I believe that something truly did fall from the sky and set two fires. However, I don’t think it was a meteorite, whatever it was.

Why don’t I believe it was a meteorite? Well, that’s a tale of bad astronomy.

I’ve always felt sorry for small meteors.

A given meteoroid may spend billions of years orbiting the Sun, perhaps first as part of a magnificent comet or an asteroid. Finally, after countless times around the Sun, its path intersects the Earth. It closes in on the Earth at a velocity that can be as high as 100 kilometers (60 miles) per second. Upon contact with our atmosphere, the tremendous speed is converted to heat, and, unless the meteoroid is too big (say, bigger than a breadbox), that heat vaporizes the tiny rock.

From our vantage point on the Earth’s surface, the meteoroid generates a bright streak that may or may not be seen by human eyes. After all those billions of years, the life of that small rock is over in a few seconds, and no one might even see it.

But its story doesn’t end there. When I am asked to name the most common example of bad astronomy, I almost always answer: meteors. Nearly everyone who is capable has seen a meteor flashing across the sky, yet, ironically, most people don’t understand them at all.

Worse, even the naming of the phenomenon gets confused. Some people call them “shooting stars,” but of course they aren’t really stars. In chapter 3, “Idiom’s Delight,” I go over the three names describing the various stages of the rock: The solid part is called a meteoroid both while out in space and passing through our atmosphere, the glow of the meteoroid as it passes through the atmosphere is called a meteor, and it’s a meteorite when (or if) it hits the ground.

But giving them names doesn’t help much. We need to know what’s going on during those stages.

A meteoroid starts out life as part of a bigger body, usually as either a comet or an asteroid. Asteroids can collide with each other, violently flinging out material or, in a worst-case scenario, shattering the parent body completely. Either way, you get debris going off rapidly in all directions. That debris can take on new orbits, where it might eventually cross paths with the Earth. When that happens, we might see a single bright meteor flash across the sky. Since the bits of meteoroid may be coming from any random direction in space, we see them come from any random point in the sky, traveling in a random direction. We call these sporadic meteors.

Cometary meteors are different. Comets are about the same size as asteroids but have a different composition. Instead of being mostly rock or metal, comets are more like frozen snowballs; rocks (from pebble size to kilometers across) held together by frozen material like water, ammonia, and other ices. When a