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Comet LINEAR Erupts
CalamityJones writes: "This Reuters blurb briefly describes a comet erupting while researchers were tracking it with the Hubble Space Telescope. A slightly more complete article covering the event is on CNN.com. What are the chances of actually catching this event just at the moment you have the earth's most powerful telescope pointing right at the comet? Maybe these guys should be playing the lottery more often. :-)"
Because I am a selfish bastard, thinking only of myself. One thing I don't spend my money on, though, is means to kill my neighbor.
In any case I think it's funny how much we spend on defense as compared to other programs. Furthermore, I didn't say that we should spend everything on feeding hungry people, I just argued why not cut the defense budget a bit and help out others? Rather than spending money on killing, why don't we spend it on helping? You are trying to turn my statement into a black and white argument. It's not... I'm not saying either spend everything on defense or everything on helping other people... I'm saying, just cut back a bit on defense and reallocate that money to help folks.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Before WWII was over, after a war our country demobilized... a lot. Maybe we shouldn't be the World's police force... Maybe we should set an example by cutting back our military presence and increasing our humanitarian presence...
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
How can NASA spend billions on X while children are starving in blah, blah, blah...
clickety, click, click
LASER CHARGING...
ZAP!
I want to see Natalie Portman, naked and $F*($G
NO CARRIER
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You jest, of course, but the fact is there is Asteroid & Comet Impact Hazards information at NASA and a consortium of astronomers called Spaceguard Project that is attempting to locate and evaluate as many potentially dangerous objects out there as they can, so that in the event we determine one is a danger, we can do something about it.
Until then it's a pretty random event that we may or may not need to worry about, on a scale of "during the whole of human civilization". From my perspective, this warrants caution and contingency planning but no real action so far. The fact is that the earlier we find a potentially-colliding object, the simpler it is to deal with; a minor orbital deflection, perhaps by a nuclear weapon, perhaps by a lander with a big-ass rocket engine, may be enough to eliminate any future concerns of a collision.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
...maybe comets erupt more often than we think. How often in the past have we had the ability to resolve the detail of a plume ejected from an erupting comet?
-AP
NASA Images! And of the comet!
.sig
Fellowship 9/11
Nice troll (as per topic). But the "as anyone who's seen Deep Impact or Armageddon knows" part just completely blew your cover. You didn't even have to defend Reagan's Star Wars at the end, but it was a nice closing touch.
Don't worry, though. I bet that some moderator will still take this seriously and mod you up as "Insightful", not "Funny".
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The persuit of knowledge and the betterment of all people by it doesn't count as "betterment of the nation" in your book?
What planet do you live on?
>Small 'rebel' nations are becoming nuclear powers. How would you like to wake up in the morning to news of Los Angles being wiped off the map?
That would be pretty cool actually. Not only would a small rebel nation come up with a nuke way better than anything we have, but then we FINALLY have a target that nobody would argue with. Considering the cost of getting rid of aging nukes, I can see the White house wondering how many hundreds of nukes to rain down on that rebel country.
Later
Erik Z
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
And deathly shy! How many more interplanetary balls of dirt must die before we stop this cruel exploitation? Boycott the Hubble Space Telescope now!
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Go ahead, blame me... I voted for Nader!
Assuming you are not a troll and respecting your right to speak...You see this money as being burned up? OK. do the world a favor and throw away your cellphone, vcr, remote controls, and be sure to return that personal computer you posted the message with. These are technological advances that you can't live without today and they all have thier origins in the space program. Read this, this, and all of this and then reflect upon your money burning up. Its great to feel a compassion for your fellow man but don't confuse the issue. If you want socialism and the like then advocate it as you see fit this is a free speaking democracy afterall. You wouldn't get my support and I am sure there are millions of ignorant people with bleeding hearts that seem to 'think' the way you do.In a democracy its not everyones obligation or responsibility to pay the bill for feeding the lazy, the overbreeders or the willfully undereducated of our society. Yet that is were I see my tax dollars burning. I would rather see my tax dollars get spent on the space program than our great war on drugs, welfare, socialized medicine, etc. which ultimately will not reflect our advances but our lack thereof. What you should be getting mad about is the fact that the prison system is the 6th largest growth industry in the US. We spend billions of dollars waging a ludicrous 'war' on drugs (which is largely a health issue not a criminal one) that is incarcerating people at an unprecedented rate and forcing the system to release violent offenders to squeeze in another 'drug' criminal with a mandatory sentence. We encourage overpopulation by increasing welfare benefits for mothers who have more and more children and never give them any incentive to change (read:why would you work if you got free money and free food?). Our country has great potential, for example, I see people wash ashore here in S.Florida all the time, not a penny to thier name and yet they start businesses and forge themselves a niche to survive in. Yet all the time I hear people like you bitch about how we have to feed the hungry, house the homeless etc. and I see people who have spent thier entire lives here saying there is no opportunity here. Don't you think that the folks out there who don't make that niche for thier existence will become part of the natural selection process that governs the nature of all things?Be sure to work extra hard today there are millions out there who are dependant on your tax dollars as thier source of income. A few % of your pennies will go to advancing the science of mankind and the rest of the dollars will feed people who didnot contribute to advancing anything other than thier laziness.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
You do make some good points, but ultimately I must disagree. It is in our very nature to explore. We feel impelled to reach and discover and push the boundaries. I think that when we push the barrier that is when we learn about ourselves.
The amount of money spent on the space program is insignificant. The loss of one of the Martian probes was around 60 to 70 cents per American. My friend today spent that much adding cheese to the top of his burrito at lunch. I'm guessing that nearly the same amount of money was wasted on that movie "Battlefield Earth." Tons of tax dollars are wasted daily by the government at all levels, and getting rid of the space program wouldn't do a bit of good.
Look, I know that there are ancillary benefits that we probably wouldn't have had otherwise. But the main reason why we should go up into space is the same reason why your Hunter-gatherer ancestor went over that next ridge. Simply because we need to.
I did a bit of my graduate work in astronomy and I remember one professor of mine who was especially fond of gambling and other sorts of oddsmaking. In any case, I remember working with him at one point in which he calculated the probability of directly observing any number of astronomical phenomena.
:)
As I recall, an event of this nature from a space-based telescope was somewhere along the lines of 1 in 3.27e5 per year observed. A ground-based telescope would give you odds approximately one order of magnitude more favorable.
Incidentally, the chances of observing the start of a supernova in a local cluster star were approximately 1 in 6e9 per year observed via a space-based telescope. Hey, one never knows, it might happen
(Naturally, all previous calculations assume observation at the moment of local occurence. Of course, it's easy enough to reorient a telescope for a major event such as the ones mentioned.)
yours,
john
They've got this all wrong. It wasn't a chance coincidence that the comet erupted when they trained Hubble on it. The act of observing it caused its wave function to collapse, and the cat said "Miaow!".
Sheesh, even scientists are forgetting their physics these days.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Hubble isn't the world's most powerful telescope.
It's the most powerful telescope in space that's pointing away from the planet, that's all.
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This is the most incredibly stupid thing I've ever heard. I mean, rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated rock-hard stupid. It goes beyond the stupid we know into an entire new quantum definition of stupid. Trans-stupid stupid. Meta stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid so dense no intellect can escape. Cosmic singularity stupid. Scorching mid-day on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one nanosecond than all of Slashdot emits in a year. Quasar stupid.
This has to be a troll. No one could be this stupid. I must have nothing better to do than reply to this drivel. Duh.
(Penicillin was developed in the 1930s by Flory and Chain. NASA was still 20+ years away.)
THS
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THS
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"Poor girl looks as confused as a blind lesbian in a fish market." - Simon R. Green
"Recta non toleranda futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"
"Recta non toleranda futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"
I didnt know there were comets with active volcanoes. Correct me if im wrong, but i thought they were all dead? maybe im thinking of asteroids - im certainly no astronomer.
... ice, mostly ... cracks and degrades. (This is possibly why the granddaddy of all comets, Halley, was pretty unspectacular on its most recent visit: there just isn't as much of it anymore.) What this event with LINEAR showed is that (unsurprisingly) this process is not a long even one but pretty chaotic and stochastic.
Dead? Well, they're not tectonically active, really. Only planets with hot molten metal cores can do that, and comets are generally balls of rock and ice that spend most of their lives way out in the Oort cloud beyond Neptune. Io is a small planet in its own right, but the main reason it's volcanically active is the constant push-pull gravitational pressures of Jupiter.
Anyway, as comets swing down close to the sun, which is what makes them comets to us, they constantly slough off material due to similar heating and gravitational pressure by the sun. Whatever held them together
In short: no volcanoes. Just melting, dirty ice.
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lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
here's a pretty excellent web page which keeps track of LINEAR/has images (though it doesn't seem to have the explosion images quite yet).
l inear_2000_sr.html
http:// www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/comet_
Here are links to this story around the Internet:
Hubble and Chandra imaged the comet in early July and saw a house sized chunk come off the comet:
NASA Press Release
A British telescope imaged the comet in late July as it completely vapourized:
Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes Press Release
Finally, here are links to the CNN article, and everywhere else on the Internet I could find:
Astronomy Now
CNN Space
Space Online
And, of course, my own coverage on Universe Today.
Fraser Cain
Publisher, Universe Today - http://www.universetoday.com
> Another freaky thing, I saw my *actual* doctor...
That's nothing. One time I clicked up a Slashdot story just after it was posted late at night, and there were more serious repliers than there were trolls.
What are the odds of that happening?
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Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade