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To: Prospero

Dirty snowball or snowy dirtball?
Na!

Not a trace of ice anywhere.


22 posted on 02/16/2015 9:45:49 AM PST by Zuse (I am disrupted! I am offended! I am insulted! I am outraged!)
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To: Zuse
This closest look at a cometary landscape had me remembering Hoyle's "dirty snowball" thing, though the work done since his time has made most planetary scientists consider these "broom stars" as a bit more complicated. Same, apparently, with the cometary origin of our oceans, or primordial water locked into the Earth-Moon system despite the violent lithologies and the hostility of space to volatiles of every kind.

I'm not seeing a dirty snowball here. I'm seeing a dirty hailstone, the kind of condensated layering of an object that passed time after time through temperature variations and vapor. And that's stranger than it might seem, at least in this star system as it is now.

Look for someone with more credibility to announce the same idea.

Another interesting thing are the boulders standing on delicate-looking thin pedestals in the weak gravity. Rosetta will be lucky not to get clobbered by one before this tour is over.

24 posted on 02/16/2015 10:03:31 AM PST by Prospero (Si Deus trucido mihi, ego etiam fides Deus.)
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