NEAT Comet Crossing: Internet Telescopes

An anonymous reader writes "During a large solar coronal mass ejection, this week's NEAT Comet crossing, gave some spectacular film footage. While no comet with such a small nucleus has ever survived that kind of close solar approach (one-fourth of Mercury's orbit) without fragmenting, this one did-- and is now outward bound on its 370 century roundtrip. These new comet discoveries have filled the log files of the now 70 big robotic telescope projects, most of which are being connected to the internet. The largest ($3 M) research-class one for public use--the Hawaiian Faulkes Project--will see first light in 45 days."

Comments

Re:Extra Credit

[Anonymous Coward]

On a related note, I've got floor tickets for Metallica!!!

Re:Of course it survived: it was small

[GuyWithLag]

Funny, I'd think the bigger problem would be the melting heat from the sun, not the gravitational differential. Especially when you consider that most comets are largely volatiles...

For the southern hemisphere

[jesterzog]

It's worth pointing out that if you live south of the equator (especially New Zealand, Australia, Southern Africa, parts of South America, etc), you should be able to see the comet within a few days from now after sunset.

It's been approaching the Sun through the northern sky until it swung around to the other side, and now it's moving away in the southern hemisphere skies. It's getting fainter every night, so by the time it's far enough from the Sun to see, it's likely you'll at least need binoculars and have to look quite carefully.

It was well outside the Roche limit

[barakn]

[T]he "Roche limit".... is the closest a object can come to another object without being torn apart.... The larger the satellite, the larger the difference in force and therefore the larger this limit.

The Roche limit for non-rotating spherical icy bodies >40 km in diameter approaching the sun is ~1.1 billion meters, and does NOT depend on size. NEAT never got closer than 15 billion meters (according to this article). Even if NEAT was much larger than it actually is, it was immune to tidal breakup.