The Autumn Equinox and Spur Moon.

0:00 Speaker 1 Willis. Today is Steve Kates, otherwise known as Doctor Sky, and he’s with us every Sunday morning to make us look up in the sky and see the mysteries of what’s going on. Steve, what’s going on this weekend?

0:17 Speaker 2 Well, good morning, John and all the listeners of the Cats Round Table. Here’s something interesting. We begin with the Sun, of course, and a special probe that we haven’t heard much about, something called the Parker Solar Probe, launched towards the Sun in August of twenty eighteen. Why is this important, Well, this probe has gotten within five point seven million miles

0:37 of the Sun. I’m surprised John, how it hasn’t burned up. That’s the great technology. But it’s the fastest object that humans have ever put on into space because the Sun’s gravity is twenty eight times whatever we would weigh on Earth, and this spacecraft it’s going about four hundred and thirty thousand miles an hour, which is still zero point zero

0:57 six four percent the speed of light. But that’s not the most important part. Most important part it’s actually gotten into one of those big cmeme coronal mass ejections and it’s discovered something which I’ll share with you in a minute.

1:11 But what the problem is with these CMEs is the sunspot energy hits the Earth, and these CMEs hit the Earth. The economists have said, John that if we get a really big one, the cost to our economy in the world would be forty one billion dollars a day in damage as it would hit the grid in the all

1:29 of our assets. So this is an amazing solar probe. But imagine what the damage would be of one of those CMEs if it was super strong that it’s probably predicted in the future to.

1:38 Speaker 1 Be well, Listen, the sun is a true mystery. We’re not going to you know, I’m sure it’s going to keep going for another billion years, give and take one hundred million, which is funny. And I in my mind, I guess my IQ is not large enough, not larger than than Einstein. I can’t imagine how it burns almost

2:08 for perpetuality.

2:10 Speaker 2 That’s incredible, because every second we talk about this crazy number, imagine if we had to pay for this fuel about eight hundred million tons of hydrogen a second, transforming it into maybe oh seven hundred and sixty million tons of helium.

2:23 And you’re right, John, that’s been going on for four billion years. Let’s keep our fingers crossed. But what happened with the Parker Solar probe. What made this discovery as it gets in towards this coronal mass ejection interesting, is that the cmeas suck up dust from the entire solar system and kind of propel it out in the solar wind,

2:41 which is totally amazing. But this is just crazy stuff. I mean, the science is just amazing. And now we come closer to home, John, we talk about space force. Now, let’s say our nation needed to deploy a rocket very quickly.

2:55 Let’s say we had a reason to get an emergency rocket up there for whatever reason. Has done this in a record time of some twenty seven hours with a product that they have actually you know, kind of contracted out called Firefly Aerospace is Alpha rocket. So they did this from the time they put an order in the

3:13 time they actually launched this out at Vandenburg, it is only twenty seven hours. So the project is called invictis Knox. What does it mean in Latin? It means conquer the night. So apparently our American space force has the ability if we needed to, say, have a rocket up in space for whatever emergency reason or other. I find that to

3:32 be incredible because there used to be a long period of time and we both know this John that a rocket if you wanted to design it or put it up in space, this literally took months, if not years.

3:43 So that’s a great accomplishment.

3:44 Speaker 1 Don’t you think NASA would be forever? Some of the new private companies, I guess have brought the time down, and I guess it shows you government work versus private enterprise.

4:00 Speaker 2 And then we go on to something even more phenomenal. Every week we talk here and the listeners told us they like it. I’m sure the mystery of the week. How about we go biblical here, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Sodom, of course, an ancient city destroyed along the Dead Sea, a sinful city in the Book of Genesis,

4:18 destroyed but by fire and sulfur, as God revealed to Abraham of the coming destruction. And we know from history that Lot’s wife was told not to look back, and she was turned to a pillar of salt. Well, astronomers have dug into this John and they think that there was this amazing fireball that is maybe one of the

4:36 reasons like a nuclear explosion called the Jordan River fireball. Now, this happened allegedly around sixteen hundred and fifty BC. So this particular explosion released the mad tremendous amounts of sulfur and salt, and one of the indicators indicates that the Dead Sea got its salt from the after effects of this big, massive explosion. And if Lot’s wife was turned

4:58 to salt, well that whole region is totally amazing in salt. So isn’t that an interesting hypothesis on something from the biblical side, that it might have been some sort of small asteroid or incredibly large fireball, that to me is just amazing and earth rocking, no pun intended.

5:17 Speaker 1 There’s also something about it that I discovered read about many years ago someplace in India Pakistan, that one of they detected that there was a nuclear explosion there a few thousand years ago.

5:36 Speaker 2 Yes, and that’s how you heard about that. Well, not exactly that story. I’m always honest with you in the audience, but I can just say this, when these astrophysicists and scientists describe a nuclear type explosion, well, we only had the nuclear processes we know in the nineteen forties with the Trinity explosion with Oppenheimer and the rest of the scientists.

5:57 So what does that tell us that maybe, who knows, alien beings from another world have the technology or had this technology, and we can’t discount that maybe in a nuclear type device was actually exploded on this Earth long time ago, and maybe not necessarily humankind created it. That’s also another plausibility, as what we’ve spanned our minds and

6:20 keep our minds open.

6:22 Speaker 1 Keep our minds open. I really believe I’ve told you this story many many times. When I was on the Emblin when one of our archbishops and I said to them about life another planets, and his answer was, what makes you think that God only spread his seeds on this planet?

6:42 Speaker 2 Exactly John, In the universe, if we look at just the galaxy alone, our Milky Way with white maybe one hundred trillion stars. Let’s take a billion of those one hundred trillion that are earthlike in the sense that have a sun or potential planets like this. I’m with you.

6:57 I think that the universe is teeming with life. We have to prove it. And finally, we just go on to remind people of the live sky here’s what you can see this week very briefly in the morning sky Venus is that brilliant object just before sunrise in the east.

7:10 You can’t miss it. It’s that bright. And we find that on this coming week we have the beautiful the last of the supermoons. We have this beautiful super Harvest moon on the twenty ninth, and I’m hoping that the Benu spacecraft capsule has already returned to Earth with those samples that were supposed to have landed over the weekend

7:30 in the Utah Desert. Amazing material from an asteroid. And we also think that life may have come from the stars, at least this scientifically in a process called panspermia. But this material off an asteroid, we may find out that there’s seeds of life, and that’s what many people believe.

7:48 Always check us out where at WABC radio dot com for the Doctor Sky experience and always Approvison or John to be with you and the audience on this Sunday and every Sunday on the Cats Round two.

8:00 Speaker 1 Kate’s enjoy the rest of the weekend, look forward to our discussions, and God bless you and God bless America.

8:06 Speaker 2 Thank you, job