Posted on 11/01/2015 7:14:40 AM PST by BenLurkin
Astronomers initially thought the object was an asteroid when they spotted it in early October, and named it Asteroid 2015 TB145.
But using the US space agency's Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF) on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, experts "have determined that the celestial object is more than likely a dead comet that has shed its volatiles after numerous passes around the sun," NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said in a statement late Friday.
...
The space rock has already grabbed attention with its unusually high speed and big size, about as large as a football stadium at 2,000 feet (600 meters) in diameter.
There is no danger of it hitting Earth, however.
When it zips by Saturday at 1 pm (1700 GMT), it will do so at a distance of 302,000 miles (486,000 kilometers).
That's about 1.3 times the distance between the Earth and the Moon.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Hmmm doesn’t look dead to me. O well, at least I got spared from cleaning my apartment. It is very important to have a clean home should the Earth fall apart.
Human brains look for patterns in everything.
How can a rock ever have been ‘alive’?
In two senses:
1. an active comet boils off all its volatiles and no longer grows a tail near the Sun, it becomes a dead lump. If it's 'dead' now, it must have been 'alive' then.
2. anything carved into rock still attached to it's parent bedrock (as opposed to quarried from the parent rock) is said to be carved from 'living rock'.
Funny language, English...
It’s not the dead comets that worry me. It’s the Living Comets that you have to watch out for.
A nice summation :)
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