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Bizarre Six-Tailed Asteroid Dumbfounds Scientists

Posted by samzenpus on from the six-tails-are-better-than-one dept.

coondoggie writes "Many images from deep space are so cool, weird and unusual it is hard to believe they are real sometimes. This is one of them. Astronomers looking deep into the asteroid belt through NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say they have spotted an asteroid, designated P/2013 P5, with six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it like spokes on a wheel or a spinning garden sprinkler."

18 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Well, there's a simple explanation, really. by olsmeister · · Score: 5, Funny

    They're thrusters.

    1. Re:Well, there's a simple explanation, really. by Jonah+Hex · · Score: 3, Informative

      I figured it was pockets of something outgassing (is that the correct term?) as is spins. Different materials heat/etc different rates blah blah cue Bill Nye or Phil Platt please.

      --
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    2. Re:Well, there's a simple explanation, really. by ackthpt · · Score: 3, Funny

      It's powered by beans.

      --

      A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    3. Re:Well, there's a simple explanation, really. by somenickname · · Score: 5, Funny

      You joke but, earlier today there was a story about Starship Troopers on Slashdot. I know that if I still lived in Buenos Aires, I'd give serious thought to getting out of town for a while...

    4. Re:Well, there's a simple explanation, really. by speckman · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That was my first thought. Hmm. Every time they take a picture of this thing, it's got a jet going in a different direction.... I mean say we took a picture of a UFO way out in space... what would it look like at lowish resolution? a lump of something with jets coming out of it? Maybe. I guess the true test for that is if it's orbit is changing unexpectedly.

      Because seriously, even putting aside the possibility of already having taken video/shots of UFOs in space, on the planet, etc., what would our first encounter with one in space be like? A grainy photo of an anomalous object that we figure must be a comet, but boy is it acting strange...

  2. It ain't no swastika. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Carl Sagan's book Cosmos, theorizes that sometime within the last 10 or 20 thousand years, a comet with four bright tails, came to wards the Earth in an end-on view. That would look like a Swastika. That shape has been recorded in Chinese manuscripts of comet descriptions. It must have made profound impact on human psyche because of so many associations of the Swastika symbol with supernatural and power.

    So I was looking for some spectacular six tailed swastika there, but, meh, some smokey trails.

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
    1. Re:It ain't no swastika. by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

      The swastika was an important symbol before Germany was a country.

      --
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  3. Fox Comet! by ElectraFlarefire · · Score: 3, Funny

    Space Kitsune!
    Off to earn it's last three tails.

  4. How to detect a really bad science writer... by RyanFenton · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Why do so many of these stories have things like "dumbfounded" or "baffled" in the title? Are these scientists just standing there, exclaiming to everyone who will listen - "I'm just so gosh-darn BAFFLED!" Not from any scientist I've met - but it's always reported as such, as if unknowns weren't a crucial element of the whole, you know, SCIENTIFIC PROCESS.

    Yeesh.

    Ryan Fenton

    1. Re:How to detect a really bad science writer... by glwtta · · Score: 5, Interesting

      They certainly don't use the word "baffled", but for all the scientist I know, the standard response to new data is "WTF is this shit?!"

      --
      sic transit gloria mundi
    2. Re:How to detect a really bad science writer... by MyHair · · Score: 4, Funny

      Try this one weird trick to understand....

    3. Re:How to detect a really bad science writer... by Chelloveck · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, in this case it's a direct quote from the lead investigator.

      "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," said lead investigator David Jewitt of the University of California at Los Angeles in a statement.

      And while I'm not sure a scientist would say "I'm just so gosh-darn BAFFLED!" I have heard them say, "Beats the hell outta me." I guess "Scientists baffled by new sighting" is a more accurate headline than "Scientists get the hell beaten out of them by new sighting."

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      Chelloveck
      I give up on debugging. From now on, SIGSEGV is a feature.
  5. better science by iggymanz · · Score: 4, Informative

    comets are icy and have tails when close to sun due to outgassing.

    Asteroids (minor planets that are stony, metallic, or carbon compound based) can have tails for various reasons, some covered in the article.

  6. Re:Science. by rossdee · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So is it accelerating or decelerating consistently?

    And if so is it heading towards us?

    We'll have to get a team of older movie stars (like Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, John Travolta and William Shatner) to intercept it

  7. Re:And... by fightinfilipino · · Score: 4, Insightful

    this is not just knowledge for knowledge's sake. this is part of efforts to observe planetoids and asteroids to determine if there's risk of collision with Earth, determining feasibility of mining asteroids for resources, or even plain and simple adding to data sets observing how planetoids and asteroids interact with space

    a lot of basic science isn't about finding groundbreaking stuff all the time. in fact, if you're doing research only looking for the "groundbreaking stuff", you're doing science wrong. much of science is straight observation. and it is USEFUL.

  8. What is this? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I clicked the link and it's just an image of two guys sitting in a car. What is this about? Why do you waste our time like this? I don't think it was very nice.

    Thank you for reading this complaint.

  9. Why tails not spirals? by arthurpaliden · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If it was spinning then would the discharge be in a spiral(s) rather that individual tails?

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    Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
  10. Re:And... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What do you want? Something engraved in stone tablets? Gold Tablets? Carefully painted in whole wheat linguini?

    Anything not coming directly from your deity of choice is going to be a rationalization. Get used to it.

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