Slashdot Mirror
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. :-)"
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