Science Daily January 20th … MIT professor Richard Binzel has examined what influence Earth might have on asteroids – which appear to be substantial. He has determined what happens when an asteroid comes within a certain range and found that the Earth causes, what he describes as ‘seismic shaking’ of the asteroid, an attempt to understand what is happening. The shaking, he says, is strong enough to bring regoliths to the surface, creating the kind of meteorites that regularly fall through the atmosphere of the Earth. Binzel, in Nature, suggests it is either gravitational pull or tidal forces that create the seismic tremors but the research itself began after it was recognised there was freshly made surfaces on some near earth rocky objects – but not on asteroids further away. The evidence can of course be interpreted in other ways but science for now acknowledges i) changes on the surface of near earth objects, and ii) they appear to result from some kind of interaction with the Earth.
Daily Galaxy January 24th … on December 27th 2004 there was an invisible burst of energy for a brief moment of time that zapped some orbiting satellite electronics, coming from, it is said, the far side of the Milky Way. These gamma rays are associated with twisted magnetic fields attempting to readjust themselves. In March 2008 a jet from a powerful stellar explosion was detected by NASAs Swift satellite, coming from the direction of the Bootes constellation. It was bright enough for the human eye to see.
www.physorg.com January 28th … volcanic lightning has been confirmed in the ash cloud on top of Mount Redoubt in Alaska in 2009 (which erupted in March). Researchers filmed 30 minutes of lightning activity.