Good Saturday everyone! We are going to stay with the astronomy lectures this week.As an update, the SEB on Jupiter that we reviewed last week is continuing to form. Here are some additional images from ALPO-Japan, this group is worth the review. We will update on this later when the images are more striking.
I ran across the following article last night, it is a new theory on where some of the comets come from.
The Sun Steals Comets from Other Stars:
Nov. 23, 2010: The next time you thrill at the sight of a comet blazing across the night sky, consider this: it’s a stolen pleasure. You’re enjoying the spectacle at the expense of a distant star.
Sophisticated computer simulations run by researchers at the Southwest Research Institute (SWRI) have exposed the crime.
“If the results are right, our Sun snatched comets from neighboring stars’ back yards,” says SWRI scientist Hal Levison. And he believes this kind of thievery accounts for most of the comets in the Oort Cloud at the edge of our solar system.
“We know that stars form in clusters. The Sun was born within a huge community of other stars that formed in the same gas cloud. In that birth cluster, the stars were close enough together to pull comets away from each other via gravity. It’s like neighborhood children playing in each others’ back yards. It’s hard to imagine it not happening.”
According to this “thief” model, comets accompanied the nearest star when the birth cluster blew apart. The Sun made off with quite a treasure – the Oort Cloud, which was swarming with comets from all over the “neighborhood.”
The Oort cloud is an immense cloud of comets orbiting the Sun far beyond Pluto. It is named after mid-20th century Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who first proposed such a cloud to explain the origin of comets sometimes seen falling into the inner solar system. Although no confirmed direct observations of the Oort cloud have been made, most astronomers believe that it is the source of all long-period and Halley-type comets.
Recently, we had a close flyby of Comet Hartley 2 with some very interesting results:
Comet Snowstorm Engulfs Hartley 2
Nov. 18, 2010: NASA has just issued a travel advisory for spacecraft: Watch out for Comet Hartley 2, it is experiencing a significant winter snowstorm.
Deep Impact photographed the unexpected tempest when it flew past the comet’s nucleus on Nov. 4th at a distance of only 700 km (435 miles). At first, researchers only noticed the comet’s hyperactive jets. The icy nucleus is studded with them, flamboyantly spewing carbon dioxide from dozens of sites. A closer look revealed an even greater marvel, however. The space around the comet’s core is glistening with chunks of ice and snow, some of them possibly as large as a basketball.
For those of you that missed the beautiful flyby pics of Harley 2, here is EPOXIs Home page.
Tags: astronomy, comets, saturday lecture series
They make your teeth turn green?
//
So if a comet were to impact a planet with a suitable atmosphere, the water that it contains in and around could theoretically be a catalyst for life?
Doesn’t really addres the origin of comets though, does it? Just passes the buck, so to speak.
@ Mike C.:
I also found it interesting that the writers originally ascribed ownership of the comets to corresponding stars. Hence the “thievery.”
This implies that previous theory had edged towards comets either coming from the star’s matter at formation themselves or were formed as a by-product of the formation process.
Bumr50 wrote:
Of course! They also taste like Kerosene.
Mike C. wrote:
Somehow, I can see a big nameplate on God’s desk in Heaven: “The Buck Stops HERE.”
Macker wrote:
Or ” All your bucks are mine”?
so our sun is a thief…..
what would Muslims do to a thief
////maybe our sun is a ghey thief
Master of the Universe
Why again did we let all those Somali “refugees” in?
On this stunet code that infected the infected ones of iran’s nuke program.
on google lots of disscussion in arabic language of this
wage slaves have cost after all
Of some note, no scanners on the bridges from Mexico to the U.S..@ snork:
@ taxfreekiller:
stuxnet…..is way beyond me
Well, what do you know…a double Mo.
Mohamed Mohamud
@ mawskrat:
@ taxfreekiller:
IMO, it’s pretty evident that the Israelis did it, and that it did some serious damage to their centrifuges. It’s probably in all of our interest for the Arabs and other muzys to believe that the Jews have magical powers. It should be pretty straightforward to protect against it, but fortunately, they can’t organize a kegger in a brewery.
Problem seems to me is that there may be ones who can enable these worms to interact with one another inside systems and or in the big servers in the sky and net work hubs too. Tell the worm codes to rewrite themselfs in order to hide better once the security companies send out their alerts, odd thing is worms can read code too.@ snork:
WTF does copyright infringement have to do with homeland security???
DHS. Groping the innernuts since 2010…
It may take a world wide “net work” off line for cleaning once in a while to get the dead and dying worms out of the basements.
@ taxfreekiller:
There are several things about this that are novel, but the big one was search and destroy on the Siemens controllers. And if they used some other brand of controller, they could still do it. But the worm has to be written for that particular plant. Otherwise we’d have crap going gonzo all over the world, just like they predicted for Y2K.
Leave the borders open long enough, then when the shit hits to fan from the terror attacks caused, then the ones in D.C. tell U.S. we have to “take over” security nation wide to protect you little people.
@ snork:
And why the frakk are they dicking around protecting hollyweird and feeling up people’s sausages instead of patrolling the damn border?
to many threads
snork wrote:
hmmm….well, isnt this interesting.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Linking U to travel, The Blogmocracy. The Blogmocracy said: Saturday Lecture Series: A New Theory on #Comets http://goo.gl/fb/RO4gp #academia #astronomy #openthread #science [...]