I Resisted the Temptation to Make a "Last Starfighter" Joke
Bowler Hat Science from Matthew R Francis
First, I promise the next newsletter will involve some original reporting. It turns out that writing about certain topics just takes more time and energy than others, but it will happen.
Second, I offer today’s link as proof that while I can avoid making pop-culture references in my articles, I refuse to do so. The original draft referenced The Last Starfighter, though, and I talked myself out of it. So there’s that.
What Tumbling Asteroids Tell Us About Their Innards
Data from the Gaia space observatory reveal that many slowly spinning asteroids rotate chaotically. A new theory links that chaos to their inner structure and history.
For Eos:
Asteroids are primordial pieces of our solar system’s history, but they aren’t exactly pristine relics. Their surfaces in particular are eroded by solar radiation and pockmarked with meteorite impacts. Detailed studies of asteroids’ interiors are also lacking, simply because very few probes have been able to study them up close.
However, a promising new study uses data from the Gaia space observatory to understand the links between asteroid tumbling behavior, collision history, and interior structure. The key to the study is the discovery that rotation speeds of asteroids in the main belt, between Mars and Jupiter, don’t follow a random distribution.
When rotation period is plotted against asteroid size, asteroids fall into two distinct populations: slow spinners, which take more than about 24 hours to complete a rotation, and fast spinners, whose rotations take less than 24 hours. Small asteroids are more likely than large ones to be slow spinners.
The Hard Part of Democracy
Living in Virginia meant that I participated in the statewide elections this week, including the election of a new governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general, and state delegate. Our elections went the way I wanted them to! But of course voting is the easy part of democracy (which is why the enemies of democracy try to make voting as hard as possible). The hard part now is not just going back to “normal”, but trying to improve those things that were always bad in this nation, in the name of building a better country, and continuing to fight the encroach of fascism.
Bowlerhattishly thine,
Matthew
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