Holmes Comet Coma Grows Bigger Than The Sun

Posted by Zonk on Thursday November 15, 2007 @07:03AM from the even-when-it's-out-of-sight-the-sun-shines-night-and-day dept.

coondoggie passed us a NetworkWorld article, as he does, noting that there is now an object in our solar system bigger than Sol. The Holmes comet has a huge coma, with a diameter scientists are now calculating to be larger than our own middle-sized star. "Scientists don't seem to have a guess as to how big it will ultimately become. The Holmes coma's diameter on Nov. 9 was 869,900 miles (1.4 million kilometers), based on measurements by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. The sun's diameter, stated differently by various sources, is about 864,900 miles (1.392 million kilometers)."

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Re:Comet P/17 Holmes visibility, naked eye aspect by Anonymous Coward · 2007-11-15 09:10 · Score: -1, Flamebait

You're not serious about that picture are you? Because there's a bunch of stars in there that are also visible as "orbs". It's a fact that the only spherical objects visible that appear as a sphere (or circle) from the earth are stellar bodies. Nothing outside of our solar system is resolvable as a sphere. The amount of post processing done to that image is pretty lame.