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. :-)"

Comments

Re:I thought comets were all dead?

[DHartung]

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.

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 ... 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.

In short: no volcanoes. Just melting, dirty ice.
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LINEAR info

[diagnosis]

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).

http:// www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/comet_l inear_2000_sr.html

Internet Coverage on this story

[Fraser Cain]

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

Re:Freaky chance stuff happens...

[Black Parrot]

> 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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