Interstellar interloper

• Autores: Keith Cooper
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3163, 2018, págs. 28-31
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Rob Weryk jokingly calls himself the guardian of Earth. Each day, the University of Hawaii postdoc goes into his office amid the palm trees of suburban Honolulu and reviews the night's information on threats from outer space. He is often the first to see a new, potentially hazardous near-Earth object (NEO) in the data streaming from the planet's early-warning system. The twin detectors of the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System, Pan-STARRS, which sit atop the 3000-metre Haleakala--a peak on the island of Maui, constantly scan the sky for space rocks straying too close. Weryk posted the discovery to the NEO confirmation page hosted by the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the clearing house for such things. With the object receding, time was of the essence for further observation, so a colleague of Weryk's, Karen Meech, bagged crucial observing time on the Hubble Space Telescope and two of the biggest ground-based telescopes, the Very Large Telescope and the Gemini South telescope, both in Chile