Most people go to bed expecting to find the same person/pet/pillow or empty space next to them that was there when they fell asleep – anything else would be cause for alarm. A woman in British Columbia awoke last week to find something it’s pretty safe to say no one on Earth has ever found in bed with them before … and lived to tell the media about it. Meet Ruth Hamilton – the woman who woke up next to a space rock.

“I was shaking and scared when it happened, I thought someone had jumped in or it was a gun or something. It’s almost a relief when we realized it could only have fallen out of the sky.”

A relief to find out the rock on your pillow where your head should have been was a meteor and not debris from a construction site? Yep, that’s what Ruth Hamilton of Golden, B.C. told the Castlegar News on October 4th after she first called the police to come look at the rock on her bed and the hole in her roof. (Photos here.)

The hole left in the ceiling, and the space rock that created it.

(Ruth Hamilton photo)

After the police assured her it was not from a burglar nor from road construction in the nearby Kicking Horse Canyon just east of Golden, Hamilton checked with her neighbors and some remembered seeing a meteor streak across the sky the night before. (Photos here and here.)

Meteor over Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada a few nights ago

faboi/Shutterstock

When you least expect it …

“It appeared quite close, and it was to the northwest of me. It went very quickly.”

“(I) saw it right above Elephant mountain, which is about 1130 meters elevation. It disappeared behind the mountain around 10:30 pm.”

Witnesses in Calgary and Nelson, British Columbia, reported their sightings to The Daily Hive, while the International Meteor Organization’s website had nearly a dozen reports from the Alberta area.

“I’m just totally amazed over the fact that it is a star that came out of the sky, It’s maybe billions of years old. The only other thing I can think of saying is life is precious and it could be gone at any moment even when you think you are safe and secure in your bed. I hope I never ever take it for granted again.”

Hamilton plans to keep the space rock as a souvenir, at least until her insurance company figures out if the roof repairs due to meteor strike are covered. And she’s obviously grateful her name wasn’t added to the very short list of people who succumbed to “death by meteorite.” In 2020, historical documents were confirmed to show the only death by meteorite occurred in on August 22, 1888 in Sulaymaniyah, Iraq, when one man was killed and another paralyzed by a space rock. In 1954, Ann Hodges was asleep on her couch in Oak Grove, Alabama, when she was hit by a piece of the Sylacauga or Hodges meteorite that crashed through the roof and seriously injured her hip – it is now in the Alabama Museum of Natural History (the space rock, not her hip).

Follow that rock!

Ruth Hamilton of Golden, BC, beat the death-by-meteorite odds — Tulane University environmental sciences professor Stephen A. Nelson calculated the odds of getting killed by a meteorite and determined them to be about 1 in 250,000.

She needs to buy a lottery ticket.

It is already known that our moon was volcanically active billion of years ago, but new lunar samples that were brought to Earth from China’s Chang’e-5 mission have changed those estimates.

The moon is approximately 4.5 billion years old and during the first billion years, it was volcanically active. The activity was believed to have lasted for millions or even hundreds of millions of years. Based on the size of the moon, it was estimated that it began cooling down approximately 3 billion years ago, ultimately making the lunar surface rather quiet and uneventful. However, a lack of craters in certain areas of the lunar surface made scientists question whether there was something else going on that they didn’t know about. Lava flows would normally harden up into a smooth shape, meaning that volcanic activity may have lasted much longer than expected.

After conducting several different experiments, researchers came to the conclusion that the rocks of basalt that were collected from the moon (these are rocks that are created from volcanic activity) were indeed formed by lava flows that occurred 2 billion years ago.

But this raises more questions as chemical analysis didn’t provide the concentration of radioactive elements that should have been there if radioactive decay was the explanation for the volcanism. Perhaps there is another reason that kept the moon volcanically active for so long. One theory explores the possibility that Earth’s gravitational forces may have liquefied the interior of the moon, letting the magma flow for a much longer time as explained by Alexander Nemchin who is a planetary scientist at the Beijing SHRIMP Center and Curtin University in Bentley, Australia, “The moon was a lot closer 2 billion years ago.” When the moon started moving away from our planet, the forces would have become less powerful, therefore allowing the volcanic activity to decrease.

Another possibility is that constant bombardment of asteroids and comets may have kept the volcanic activity to continue; however, “at this point, any guess is a good guess,” said Jessica Barnes who is a planetary scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson but wasn’t involved in the study.

For now, what we do know is that based on the lunar rocks that have been brought back to Earth and analyzed, there was volcanic activity on our moon as recently as just 2 billion years ago – much later than previously thought and by far the youngest moon rocks that have ever been collected. Interestingly, the rocks formed around the same time that multicellular life was first beginning to evolve on our planet.

The study was published in Science where it can be read in full.

From both the “What could possibly go wrong?” and the “Science fiction becomes reality” files comes word that NASA has officially announced the launch date for a mission to attempt to deflect an asteroid from its path as a test of technology that may one day be needed to save Earth from a meteor or comet on a path to causing mass destruction and possible mass extinction. Movies depicting this scenario (Deep Impact, Armageddon) ended with generally happy conclusions. Will real life follow that script? Get your favorite movie quotes and clichés ready!

“Media accreditation is open for the upcoming launch of NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission, an evaluation of technologies for preventing a hazardous asteroid from striking Earth.

DART is targeted to launch at 10:20 p.m. PST, Nov. 23, 2021, (1:20 a.m. EST, Nov. 24), aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Live coverage of the launch will air on NASA TV, the NASA app, and the agency’s website.

DART will be the first demonstration of the kinetic impactor technique, which involves sending one or more large, high-speed spacecraft into the path of an asteroid in space to change its motion. Its target is the binary near-Earth asteroid Didymos and its moonlet, which pose no threat to Earth.”

Official DART poster (all images courtesy of NASA)

DART has been talked about for decades, planned since 2018, and needed since science proved that space rock impacts caused many great extinctions. At the same time, astronomers began getting better at tracking Near Earth Objects, terrorizing Earthlings with predictions of “close but no cigar” meteors and having no answers for actual impacts and near hits they seem to miss on a regular basis. Seeing how popular the blast-an-asteroid movies were and having no other near-term options, NASA decided to try it out on a tiny hapless near-but-not-dangerous asteroid named Dimorphos (Didymos B) which is orbiting Didymos A in the 65803 Didymos binary asteroid system. Didymos A is about 780 m (2,560 ft) in diameter while Dimorphos is just 160 m (520 ft) in diameter As the NASA press release reports, “Didymos is not an Earth-crossing asteroid, and there is no possibility that the deflection experiment could create an impact hazard.” Famous last words? So … what is DART going to do?

“The DART spacecraft will achieve the kinetic impact deflection by deliberately crashing itself into the moonlet at a speed of approximately 6.6 km/s, with the aid of an onboard camera (named DRACO) and sophisticated autonomous navigation software. The collision will change the speed of the moonlet in its orbit around the main body by a fraction of one percent, but this will change the orbital period of the moonlet by several minutes – enough to be observed and measured using telescopes on Earth.”

Solar-powered DART will perform more of a nudge than a knockout – pushing Dimorphos slightly out of its orbit 1 km away from Didymos A but far enough that it can be observed and measured by telescopes. That nudge will be caused by DART itself as it self-destructs into Dimorphos in true movie fashion right after it takes one more look back at its home.

Two different views of the DART spacecraft. The DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance & Asteroid Camera for OpNav) imaging instrument is based on the LORRI high-resolution imager from New Horizons. The left view also shows the Radial Line Slot Array (RLSA) antenna with the ROSAs (Roll-Out Solar Arrays) rolled up. The view on the right shows a clearer view of the NEXT-C ion engine. (credit: NASA)

The DART spacecraft launch window begins November 24, 2021. DART will launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California. After separation from the launch vehicle and over a year of cruise it will intercept Didymos’ moonlet in late September 2022, when the Didymos system is within 11 million kilometers of Earth, enabling observations by ground-based telescopes and planetary radar to measure the change in momentum imparted to the moonlet. (Pause a moment to wipe a romantic tear.)

DART is targeted to launch at 10:20 p.m. PST, Nov. 23, 2021, (1:20 a.m. EST, Nov. 24), aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. NASA is obviously excited about this mission as it is promoting this launch more than usual.

Tom Cruise lost his race to shoot the first movie on the ISS. Maybe he still has time to cut a deal for “Armageddon II – This Time It’s Personal.”

Approximately 30 million years ago, there was a mass extinction that nobody knew about until recently. As a matter of fact, a whopping 63% of mammals vanished from different parts of the Earth.

The extinction event occurred just after the changes of the geological periods of Eocene and Oligocene. This was also around the time when our planet experienced a drastic climate change from being swampy to icy. The Earth got colder, there were more ice sheets, sea levels dropped, forests turned into grasslands, and there was less carbon dioxide.

As for the mammals living in Africa, they were believed to have survived unharmed because of the continent’s mild temperatures and the proximity to where it was to the equator would have helped in preventing the cooler climates. Unfortunately, based on new research, the African mammals did not survive.

Climate change brought more ice.

A team of international researchers from the United States, England, and Egypt, analyzed a large amount of fossils that are located at the Duke Lemur Center Division of Fossil Primates (DLCDFP) and they found that even though Africa did have warmer weather, the mammals living there were just as tragically affected as those living in Europe and Asia.

The team studied fossils belonging to different groups of mammals – extinct carnivores called hyaenodonts; two rodent groups; anomalures (scaly-tail squirrels) and the hystricognaths (this group includes porcupines and naked mole rats); two primate groups, the strepsirrhines (lemurs and lorises), and the anthropoids (apes and monkeys). By creating a family tree for each of these groups, the team was able to determine that all of them suffered massive losses during the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. On a positive note, millions of years later, they did start appearing again but with different characteristics, specifically the changes in their teeth which indicated a change in their diet and habitat – like a “recovery period”.

Matt Borths, who is a curator of Duke University’s DLCDFP, noted, “Extinction is interesting in that way,” adding, “It kills things, but it also opens up new ecological opportunities for the lineages that survive into this new world.”

The dramatic climate change wasn’t the only factor that these animals had to deal with as East Africa suffered volcanic super eruptions and flood basalts when the temperatures dropped. “We lost a lot of diversity at the Eocene-Oligocene boundary,” Borths explained, “But the species that survived apparently had enough of a toolkit to persist through this fluctuating climate.”

Hesham Sallam, who is the founder of the Mansoura University Vertebrate Paleontology Center in Egypt, weighed in by stating, “Climate changes through geological time have shaped the evolutionary tree of life.” “Collecting evidence from the past is the easiest way to learn about how climate change will affect ecological systems.” A picture of some of the fossils the team analyzed during their research can be seen here.

The study was published in the journal Communications Biology where it can be read in full.