(Under construction.)
Earth rings
- Jones, G. Observations on the zodiacal light, April 2, 1853 to April 22, 1855 (Vol. III, Report by Secretary of the Navy to the House of Representatives, 1856) - The first suggestion I know of that Earth has its own ring. Jones proposed that the zodiacal light can be interpreted as the visual sign of a ring in the plane of the ecliptic. It is now generally interpreted otherwise, but since the Phoebe ring was discovered at Saturn just a few years ago, the question arises more strongly whether moons supply planetary rings. In that case, it will be worth remembering that the plane of the ecliptic is not far from the plane of our Moon's orbit. Jones's proposal may be vindicated in that way one day.
- O'Keefe, J.A. 1980. The terminal Eocene event: formation of a ring system around the Earth? Nature - The first paper I know of in which O'Keefe raised this idea. He pursued it in other papers afterward, of which a selection here.
- Pepin, R.B. 1992. The early Martian atmosphere. Lunar and Planetary Institute Conference -Only mention I've seen of whether Mars could have rings. It should, if we do. Further, one of the Newgrange carvings looks like a couple of little tiny ringed planets tucked in under the loopy structure. Makes sense if the loopy structure is along the ecliptic. Which planets? Considering that this interpretation must concern only visual observations, Mars seems particularly likely. Faraway planetary rings would be hard to see even if ten times as dense. Note: paste that figure in here.
Geologically active moon
- O'Keefe, J.A. Tektites and Their Origin (Elsevier, 1976). Since the Moon is the only possible source of enough material to make a ring, the question of whether it is geologically active is closely tied to the question of an Earth ring. There has been a consensus view that the Moon is dead, now possibly changing direction. O'Keefe thought the Moon volcanically active and possibly dangerous today. This followed from via his investigations of tektites, a puzzling class of rocks that is found here and there on Earth. It was from this point of view that O'Keefe hypothesized that an Earth ring supplied by the Moon might have been possible once, and in fact, might be possible today. Thus the tektite controversy is linked to the ring hypothesis.
A bit about the tektite/Moon controversy. The small thread sticking out of the consensus view that the Moon is dead and that tektites come from the Earth was just one absolutely impossible sticking point: as O'Keefe said, tektites are made of fine glass that can not be made in a moment of impact. Thus they are not terrestrial, thus they are lunar, thus, since some tektites are recent falls, the Moon is volcanic today. For this small stubborn fact, O'Keefe went against a torrent of consensus opinion. More recently, "tektites" have been redefined to include certain categories of material (such as the Libyan Desert Glass) that is otherwise like other tektite fields but is not fine glass. Following this redefinition it would no longer be correct to say that all tektites are fine glass. But this does not mean that O'Keefe's point has been answered, only that a semantic change has made it more difficult to state where the long-standing problem continues to lie.
O'Keefe's 1976 book is a sourcebook summarizing findings from the hundreds of papers written up to then: geological, chemical, physical, and so on. I am at work putting its text and illustrations and references on a website at http://www.originoftektites.com/ because the Elsevier book is out of print. (This website provision of the text and illustrations is legal because the book was written and illustrations prepared by O'Keefe while he was a civil servant on Government time so those cannot be and were not copyrighted. Elsevier's copyright applies to the layout. I remember those negotiations from when I was in high school. I also well remember O'Keefe's disappointment when this book, a vast labor that he aimed to be helpful to other investigators, was priced for libraries rather than individuals, and eventually went out of print. Well, I have fixed that.) Once again, http://www.originoftektites.com/
As a matter of interest, I am planning to argue eventually that dust storms are lunar material, and that Libyan Desert Glass looks like tektites yet is not fine glass because Libyan Desert Glass is impact glass made on a field of lunar tektite material ground to dust in space and fallen to earth in sand storms. I am also preparing to meet Wasson's similar point that tektites must be terrestrial because they have the composition of Chinese loess, by pointing out why Chinese loess is also probably ultimately lunar material.
- Hal Povenmire, a tektite investigator from Cape Canaveral, publishes updates on the tektite controversy from time to time. Every one of these is useful as well as fun to read. Tektites: A Cosmic Paradox (1997) focuses on the Georgia tektite strewn field but includes a lot of useful general material, inter alia an interview with John A. O'Keefe in which he discusses the tektite controversy and comments on new work in the field up to 1997. Most recent: Tektites: A Cosmic Enigma, from 2003. Another one is due in 2012-2013. Buy a copy by writing to him at katiehal1@yahoo.com
Radiation pressure and YORP
The Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack (YORP) effect is key to the Earth ring hypothesis to explain how a ring of rocks could become optically dense, why this optical density would be sensitive to solar activity, and could be renewed again and again even if the ring of rocks were renewed infrequently.
- Paddack, Stephen J., Rotational bursting of small celestial bodies: Effects of radiation pressure, J. Geophys. Res., 74, 4379–4381 (1969)
- Radzievskii, V. V. (1954). "A mechanism for the disintegration of asteroids and meteorites". Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR 97: 49–52.
- Rubincam, David P., Radiative spin-up and spin-down of small asteroids, Icarus, 148, 2–11 (2000)
Radiation pressure could also be important. Willie's refs. to be addd.
Dust
Limiting Future Collision Risk to Spacecraft: An Assessment of NASA's Meteoroid and Orbital Debris Programs. Committee for the Assessment of NASA's Orbital Debris Programs; National Research Council. National Academy of Sciences, 2011.
The Secret Life of Dust. Hannah Holmes. Wiley (2001). This is a great book though old. Among other things it brings together references and the key words needed to pull together an updated look at all kinds of separate investigations. Of special interest are the references to desert dust, the dust rivers, the Asian Express, key dust events (up to 2001). It is a delightful read.
Visualization
Zodiacal light, Gegenschein, comets, other lights in the sky
- Jones (1856), the first reference above.
Climate
- W. Soon, The Maunder Minimum.
Data sources (not in order)
- NCEP/NCAR Re-analysis - Daily data January 1948 to present: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/composites/day/
- NCEP/NCAR Re-analysis - 6-hourly data January 1948 to present: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/composites/hour/
- NOAA/PSD 20th Century Re-analysis - 3/6 hourly data January 1871 to 2008: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/composites/subdaily_20thc/
- The KNMI Climate Explorer - Global time series: http://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi?id=someone@somewhere
- NOAA: The radiation budget - http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/atmosphere/rad_budget.html
- NASA: The Giovanni portal to aerosol measurements and models: http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/giovanni/overview/index.html
- Private aggregator: Space weather - http://www.spaceweather.com/
- Private aggregator: Tornado history - http://www.tornadohistoryproject.com/
- NASA catalog of eclipses - http://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEsaros/SEsaros154.html
- NOAA climate history data : http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search
- LPI abstract search: http://www.lpi.usra.edu/publications/absearch/
- NOAA climate prediction center (especially for the teleconnections): http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/
- NWS: Solar flares - qualitative remarks: http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/WhatsNew.html
- Lunar transient phenomena - http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1975Moon...14..187C - I think some of these are forward scattering of moonlight from the ring, a phenomenon that we must see if there is a ring there. Some others I think are obscuration by ring dust when it is at an angle to obscure rather than forward scatter. And some I think show a geologically active moon. Winifred Cameron was an associate of John O'Keefe and he thought very highly of her work.
- Arlin Crotts' page on TLPs - sources to 2009: http://www.astro.columbia.edu/~arlin/TLP/
