For astronomers it couldn’t get any better than this. But the people of Sutherland couldn’t have cared less about the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet, reports Mondli waka Makhanya
THE men at Sutherland’s South African Astronomical Observatory were as bubbly as nursery school kids at a birthday party as they prepared to view the first in a series of explosions as the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet smashed into Jupiter.
The excitement and anticipation at the observatory could not have been more starkly contrasted by the indifference in Sutherland itself. The townsfolk did not care about the event and the influx of outsiders into their sleepy town baffled them. They’d seen it all before — in 1986 their town had been invaded by Halley’s comet disciples, and the same happened in 1987 when the supernova was sighted.
“It doesn’t affect us, we continue to live our lives and if they don’t get in our way, it’s all right,” said one Sutherlander.
And so the cafes (all three of them), the solitary Shell filling station, and the rest of the town shut down at five o’clock, only to partly re- open the next afternoon when kerk was over. The only locals who felt the impact of the occasion were the owners of the only hotel, which had been fully booked for the past week, and the operators of the manual telephone exchange, who were overwhelmed by the unprecedented volume of international and national telephone traffic as star watchers around the globe called the observatory.
Life was, however, looking up for the men in the domes who would be the first in the world to see the results of the crash. In some respects they are your archetypal eggheads: thick-lensed spectacles and an unusual sense of humour. They stare into computer screens and see images which are invisible to ordinary folk’s eyes. Ask them a question and they’ll excitedly rattle off something in astronomese. But then another of their breed will step forward to interpret.
For the past year, since American astronomers Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy discovered the fragmented comet travelling head- on towards Jupiter at 200 000km an hour, excitement levels in the astronomical fraternity have been rising rapidly. In local astronomy circles, the excitment was further boosted by the fact that South Africans would be the first to observe the impact.
What raised the intrigue of the occasion was the astronomers themselves did not know what they would see. They looked through their multi-million rand instruments for something they did not know much about except that it would hit a planet about which little is known and they did not know what the effect would be.
“The amazing thing about this whole thing is just how little we all know. In fact, we actually don’t know all that much about comets themselves,” said astronomer David Laney.
All they would predict was the full impact would be “like sticking needles in an apple, with lots of damage done locally but little damage done to the shape of the whole”.
Cometh the hour but the comet cometh not. At 23:00 University of Hawaii astronomer Matt Senay — here especially for the occa-sion — pronounced that “we have passed a 99 percent probability that if anything happened the site of the impact would have by now rotated into view”.
“What he means is that if anything happened we would have seen it by now,” translated Laney.
Half an hour and a lot of computer analysis later, no sign of collision had been spotted by the men in the Sutherland domes. Besides, an observatory in Spain had already stolen the show, having reported sighting plumes at 22:18.
But the astronomers were not dejected, preferring rather to say this week’s crash was the one to watch for.
Time to call it a day! Not quite yet. Astronomer Kazhiro Sekiguchi galloped out of his dome proclaiming miraculous sightings. He confessed that while he was out making tea at about “18 past 10”, his infra-red telescope picked up a plume off the surface of Jupiter, which he had dismissed as nothing and went on to his favourite pastime of gazing at the centre of the galaxy. Only chance drove him back to his computer.
“Now at least we know what to look for,” says SAAO director Bob Stobie.
The star gazers sipped their whiskeys and reminisced about the evening’s event.
Down below, Sutherland’s streets were deserted, the last patrons having left the kroeg way before midnight. The only soul awake was the exchange operator, transferring calls to and from the observatory.