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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."

9 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 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...

  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.

    --
    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.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  3. 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....

  4. 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.

  5. 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.