You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘meteors’ tag.
This blog entry was written to accompany my podcast for the September 5, 2010 broadcast of the 365 Days of Astronomy. The podcast can be listened to here.
One of the high points of my stay in Germany recently was a visit I made to Nördlingen on the border between the provinces of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg in southern Germany. It’s a beautiful place. It is enclosed by a defensive wall that dates back to the 14th Century – there are only three towns in Germany with this claim to fame. All the buildings are full of character. The town was the site of two battles during the Thirty Years War and were it not for the cars and the shops, you could easily imagine yourself in another time, another era.
But beautiful and all though the town is, this is not the reason I went there. It’s Nordlingen’s surroundings that interested me the most. The town is located in a region known as the Ries: a round, flat plain with an approximate diameter of around 23 km (15 miles). This area is quite different to the surrounding countryside as the following scale model clearly indicates.
For many centuries, the prevailing idea about how this geological feature came to be was that it was an ancient volcanic caldera. The trouble was that much of the boulders and debris surrounding the region were of non-volcanic origin. Many ideas were presented as to how this material got there, but it’s didn’t fully add up. The origins of the Ries remained controversial until fifty years ago.
Enter Eugene “Gene” Shoemaker. Gene was an astronomer and he had a few questions. When he looked at the Moon he saw a landscape quite different to the Earth. Everywhere on the Moon he saw craters. Big craters, small craters, enormous craters. Why then was the Earth practically devoid of them? Was it credible that the Moon could be subject to the slings and arrows of outrageous impacts while its larger sister, our planetary home, missed them all? He was convinced that the evidence for impact craters must exist on Earth, but where were they all? Gene had a good idea what kind of material would be created when a large object hit the Earth. It was just a matter of finding it.
Rieskrater MuseumHintere Gerbergasse 3
86720 Nördlingen, Deutschland
09081 273822-0
MeteorkratermuseumHochfeldweg 589555 Steinheim, Deutschland
Next Sunday, September 5th, The 365 Days of Astronomy website will be broadcasting my second podcast.
It’s all about two gigantic meteor craters in the heart of Europe. I talk about how they were created, what they look like today and how their discovery has changed the way we look at our planet. I will be backing up the podcast with pictures and further details here on this blog.
Please take a listen in and let me know what you think.
(Oh, and if you never heard my first podcast for 365DOA, you can find it here).
My first ever podcast, “A series of spectacular events” has been posted on the 365 Days of Astronomy blog today. It recounts a number of memorable experiences that I had while looking upwards at the skies over the past few years: a meteor storm, an aurora and a space shuttle launch. Hopefully it will convey the power of astronomy to recreate that sense of wonder that we had in abundance as children.
I’d love to hear your feedback on this. It was a lot of fun to put together and I have a few other ideas in the pipe-works that I would love to turn into finished podcasts some time in the future.
Recent Comments