Physics Buzz

The size of a small city, the target asteroid is imposing. The cracks and craters on its surface reflect years of wear in the extreme and dangerous environment of deep space.

A potentially hazardous object headed straight for us. Little time to prepare. Possible mass extinction. Perpetual winter. The rekindling of life. It sounds like, and it is, the stuff of movies. It’s also the stuff of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting , taking place this week in San Francisco.

It’s the beginning of a story that draws you in, but it’s the ending that leaves you lingering, forever connected to the characters. At least if it’s a good story. The fairy tale of Rosetta and Philae , the first spacecraft and lander to rendezvous with a comet and travel with it in orbit around the sun, came to a close early Saturday morning (EDT) in a well-crafted ending.

We're starting a new tradition here the Physics Central Podcast: once a month we'll be bringing you a roundup of our favorite physics news stories from the past 30 days. June has been a rocky month for science news: an  asteroid that made a drive-by past earth ; scientists made a new discovery about rocks brought back from the moon ; and the earth's most abundant mineral just got a nam e. And then there's the fact that frogs eyes can see single photons . That's this week on the Physics Central News Podcast.

Last September, two telescopes captured a spectacular flash of light on the moon's surface lasting more than 8 seconds — the longest and brightest flash ever confirmed on the lunar surface. Scientists have now attributed the record-breaking flash to a meteoroid impact and the resulting vaporization of plasma in a paper published online yesterday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society . Despite the huge flash, the cause was relatively small — a rock about one meter across. Nonetheless, researcher Jose Madiedo (University of Seville) and his team estimate that the rock slammed into the surface at speeds exceeding 50 kilometers per second, leaving a crater roughly 45 meters wide. A picture of the lunar impact from September 11, 2013.  The flash caused by a meteoroid impact lasted for over 8 seconds — the longest flash ever confirmed. Image Credit : Jose Madiedo et. al/MIDAS Observatory/MNRAS

Scientists think they might have pinpointed where the infamous Russian meteorite  of 2013 came from. Astronomers Carlos de la Fuente Marcos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos from the Complutense University of Madrid calculated that it likely originated as a piece of a near-Earth asteroid named 2011 EO40. On the morning of February 15, the skies above Chelyabinsk, Russia lit up as an enormous fireball streaked out of the sky and exploded overhead. Scientists estimate that the meteorite was about the size of a six-story building. It's one of the biggest meteor impacts in recorded history, but it's a pretty small rock compared with some of the ones out there. It exploded 14 miles above the Earth's surface with the force of about 25 Hiroshima bombs, injuring about 1,500 people.

Early Friday morning, a streaking meteor illuminated the sky over Chelyabinsk, Russia. Seconds later, meteorite debris pummeled the city, injuring over 900 people . A shcokwave from the meteor's higher altitude explosions also cracked as it reached the ground and shattered glass windows. Below are a few videos of the incident as compiled by redditors "Therecanonlybetwo" and "hattmarington," respectively. The first video shows the meteor streaking across the sky from the view of a dashcam. The second video captured the booming shockwave's arrival on ground level and the subsequent damage.

Last week, the asteroid 4179 Toutatis made its quadrennial encounter with Earth. This year marks Toutatis's closet flyby, coming about 4.3 million miles away (about 18 times the distance to the moon) on December 12, 2012. As the 3-mile-long asteroid whizzed by, NASA's 230-foot Deep Space Network antenna in Goldstone, California, captured radar images of the oblong asteroid tumbling through space.

As the U.S. election season heats up, politicians have increasingly focused on important issues such as the economy, foreign policy, and Clint Eastwood's fascination with empty chairs. Today, the often overlooked area of science policy received its due attention from both President Obama and his opponent, Mitt Romney. The non-profit ScienceDebate organization posed 14 critical science policy questions to both presidential candidates, and the candidates handed in their written homework today. Members of the public suggested questions before national scientific organizations narrowed down and refined the final list. Dozens of organizations including the American Physical Society, the National Academies of Science, and the American Association for the Advancement of science helped coordinate this year's list. While the candidates prevaricated on most of the questions, a few of their answers were more revealing. Here's a glimpse at how each candidate responded to questions