There was a bit of a buzz last week about Sky & Telescope's cover story for its April 2012 issue, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, which occurred on April 14, 1912. In the article, two astronomers from Texas State University-San Marcos, along with a senior contributing editor of Sky & Telescope, put forth an intriguing theory about what might have caused the high number of icebergs that made their way into the shipping lanes used by Titanic and other passenger and cargo ships in 1912.
The theory of the Texas astronomers is that a highly unusual confluence of cosmic events might have been an invisible causal factor in the wreck. Specifically, they explain that on January 4, 1912, the Moon passed closer to the Earth than it had in the previous 1,400 years. Not only did that event coincide with an almost full moon, which normally leads to higher tides each month, but it happened the day after the earth reached its annual perihelion, or its closest point to the Sun. The researchers theorize that the increased gravitational pulls of such a close pass of the Moon, at a full moon, when the Earth was at its closest point to the Sun, could have created a record-setting high tide.
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