Posted on 12/16/2007 4:15:48 PM PST by camerakid400
The sun is no longer the largest object in our solar system. At least for a while anyway. Comet 17P/Holmes suddenly exploded on October 23, making it a million times brighter within a few hours and causing its gas and dust cloud to expand until it was measured at 0.9 million miles across by November 9 by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. And it's still growing. The sun's diameter is about 864,900 miles.
The comet should begin to shrink back to a more normal size in the near future. The nucleus of comet 17P/Holmes is made of ice and rock and is just 2.3 miles in diameter. Astronomers theorize that a large chunk of the comet broke off and disintegrated into tiny dust particles.
Here's a larger version of this image. The images of the sun and Saturn are courtesy of ESA/NASA's SOHO and Voyager projects). The comet image is from the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Here are more details from the University of Hawaii's David Jewitt.
cool!
So a suicide bomber is, for a moment, bigger than anyone else in the world.
hehe
LOL!
This was a couple weeks ago. The comet had faded to about mag 3 then but was still visible with a good sky.
They’re swell guys for the first microsecond or so.
ping
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