ScienceArrows on a composite image of the comet Tempel 1 point to two areas where the surface is smooth instead of spotted with depressions.
Posted on 09/07/2005 12:10:01 PM PDT by neverdem
Although comets form at the frigid edges of the solar system, they appear somehow to contain minerals that form only in the presence of liquid water, and at much warmer temperatures, scientists are reporting today.
On July 4, as planned, part of the Deep Impact spacecraft - essentially an 820-pound, washing machine-size bullet - slammed into the comet Tempel 1 at 23,000 miles an hour. The collision tossed up thousands of tons of ice and dust from the comet that were observed by telescopes on Earth as well as small flotilla of spacecraft.
One of the observers was the Spitzer Space Telescope, a NASA mission that takes pictures in the infrared part of the spectrum. In the burst of light after the collision, Spitzer detected specific colors of infrared light that indicated that Tempel 1 contained clays and carbonates, the minerals of limestone and seashells.
Clays and carbonates both require liquid water to form.
"How do clays and carbonates form in frozen comets where there isn't liquid water?" said Carey M. Lisse, a research scientist at the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University who is presenting the Spitzer data today at a meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences in Cambridge, England. "Nobody expected this."
Spitzer also detected minerals known as crystalline silicates. Astronomers had already known that comets contain silicates, but silicates line up in neat crystal structures only when they are warmed to 1,300 degrees Fahrenheit - temperatures reached at around the orbit of Mercury - and then cooled.
"How do you do that and then how do you put that stuff into a comet that forms out by Pluto?" Dr. Lisse said.
Dr. Lisse said that the presence of the clays, carbonates and crystalline silicates indicated that material in the solar system's primordial cloud had somehow...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Sciencekewl--bump
ping
Sez them..........
bump for later.
Could be that they are interpreting their IR signals with a terracentric view.
It also seems a bit rash to me to be generalizing data for all Oort and Kuiper objects using data from just one.
"Could be that they are interpreting their IR signals with a terracentric view."
How horribly unprogressive. Down with terracentrism!
It looks like an interesting article, but no way am I going to the New York Times to read the rest.
Metaresearch.org has some explanations for this. Interesting none the less
"How do clays and carbonates form in frozen comets where there isn't liquid water?"
Remnants from a previous solar system I venture to guess.
It's taken a while for the analysis to start getting some results, as expected. The comet seems to be like a cottonball cone you would buy and possibly eat at the fair. There isn't much substance to it. But what there is would be very useful on the moon if they can get it there.
or remnants from the early bodies in this solar system.
Hmmm... evidence of Tiamat? What do Enki, Enlil, and the rest of the Nibiruians have to say about this? ;-)
the obvious answer is that it formed somewhere warmer.
From the moon's birth perhaps.
No, it's just another piece of evidence for the exploded planet theory.
or the collision which formed the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, or any number of other impacts.
al data indicates that the early solar system was a rather hoppin' jernt.
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