Asteroid 62412. Credit: Scott Sheppard
Posted on 11/22/2014 12:31:05 AM PST by Swordmaker
Comets are often called “dirty snowballs” by astronomers. However, various investigative missions, such as Giotto and Deep Impact, revealed them to be blackened, cratered, and fractured. No ice fields, reflective crust, or watery clouds were observed. Indeed, the latest pictures from the Rosetta mission of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko indicate that it is a mountain of rock in space.
According to a recent press release, the Gemini Observatory’s image of asteroid 62412, located between Mars and Jupiter, is the first time that one of the Hygiea family of asteroids has exhibited a tail, and is only the 13th “active” asteroid seen there. As the announcement states, why asteroids grow tails is unknown but, “… recent impacts or sublimation from solid to gas of exposed ices” are thought to be potential causes.
A previous Picture of the Day discussed asteroid 596 Scheila, which formed a large C-shaped coma. The Swift space-based observatory did not find water vapor thought to be “normally” associated with comets. Instead, two dusty plume-like tails trailed behind the asteroid, subsequently fading over the next several months.
Another Picture of the Day described several “Centaur objects” orbiting near the asteroid belt that demonstrate an indeterminate state between comet and asteroid. 2060 Chiron, for example, is now identified as both comet and asteroid, since it develops a coma whenever it reaches its closest approach to the Sun, although it does not grow a tail.
Further blurring the line between the two classes of celestial object, Comet Tempel 1 resembles an asteroid more than a chunk of muddy slush. Craters, boulders, and cliffs were observed by the Deep Impact mission. As previously written, Deep Space 1 flew by comet Borrelly in 2001, finding it hot and dry instead of cold and wet. Although the Rosetta mission’s Philae lander did not perform as expected, one thing it did manage to discover is that the surface of 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is tough and hard, not fluffy and frangible.
Proponents of mainstream viewpoints are slowly beginning to realize that asteroids and comets exist in a continuum: neither are strictly identical nor completely different from the other. When the Stardust mission returned to Earth with samples from the coma of comet Wild 2, scientists found that the material looked more like meteoric dust than what was expected from a dirty snowball.
Whatever water or hydroxyl compounds found in cometary comas are probably created there, as Wal Thornhill has explained: ionized oxygen from comets reacts with hydrogen ions streaming out from the Sun. No jets of water vapor spew from comets, and no icy plains have ever been observed. It is electric effects that are seen. Discharges and arcs form the comet phenomena.
Intense electric fields in space most likely create comets. If an asteroid experiences something similar, such as an electromagnetic encounter with a gas giant’s plasmasphere, cometary activity could be said to be “expected”.
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I love this. With all our knowledge, science and capability, we are just now learning that comets are not snowballs.
It simply demonstrates how little we actually know about the universe around us and why we should always be skeptical of those who claim the science is “settled”.
Errors certainly come from jumping to conclusions and ignoring the details, wherein lies the devil.
That is correct. What passed as "common knowledge" just 200 years ago would seem ridiculous today. Such as blood-letting to cure diseases, that the speed of sound was a physical barrier and the notion that it was impossible to have a man-made machine fly.
Two hundred years from now, educated people will look back to us today and shake their heads on how primitive and ignorant we were.
And that cycle will be repeated again 200 years hence.
Many mysteries of the universe will remain unseen and unseeable for human beings. We will never attain "all the knowledge" out there due to the limitations of our physical senses.
Think about how a dog can hear sounds that cannot be heard by humans. That is but a tiny fraction of what's out there that will never be heard or seen by any living creature.
Just consider the Brady Bunch TV show for example. Observe a still photo from the show below and analyze it. Now this is just one instant from a frivolous TV show from the 1970s yet that one still will continue to yield new things for many generations to come. For instance, why are they carrying shopping bags when there is ample room in the carts?
Why did I pick this show to make my example? I could have picked anything at all. It was entirely random. Just like our universe.
from the varchive:
March 7, 1955
Dear Professor Einstein:
I thank you again for the discussion of the first 8 pages of my letter. Here are the quotations from John Herschel and W. Pickering I have mentioned in our last conversation:
“There is beyond any question some profound secret and mystery of nature concerned in the phenomenon of their tails”; “enormous sweep which it [the tail] makes round the sun in perihelion, in the manner of a straight and rigid rod, is in defiance of the law of gravitation, nay, even of the recorded laws of motion.”
J. Herschel, Outlines of Astronomy, p. 406
“What has puzzled astronomers since the time of Newton, is the fact that while all other bodies in the sidereal universe, as far as we are aware, obey the law of gravitation, comets’ tails are clearly subject to some strong repulsive force, which drives the matter composing them away from the sun with enormously high velocities.”
— W.H. Pickering, article “Comets” in Encyclopedia Americana.
Cordially yours,
Immanuel Velikovsky
http://www.varchive.org/cor/einstein/550307ve.htm
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