Comet-Sun Impact Caught On Video 61
Posted
by
timothy
from the comet-denies-responsibility dept.
from the comet-denies-responsibility dept.
jomegat writes "NASA has released footage captured by the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) showing a comet slamming into the surface of the sun. The impact created a huge splash as seen on the video, but the impact at the surface was blocked by an occluding disk that allows the SDO to image the sun's corona. It's still very impressive though!"
Re:Finally!!! (Score:5, Interesting)
Some asshat on facebook complained that the sun doesn't have a surface, ...
Similarly, if you look closely enough at what appears to be your (skin) surface, you'll find that in reality it's nothing more substantive than a fuzzy cloud of electrons. Small neutral particles of about the same size as the electrons (neutrons, neutrinos, etc.) have no problem with this "surface", and pass through it as if it didn't exist.
Whether something has a "surface" depends a lot on your definition of the term.
Re:Finally!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
Small neutral particles of about the same size as the electrons (neutrons, neutrinos, etc.)
Let us do a quick Google search on that.
Neutrinos and electrons are regarded as fundamental particles with zero volume -- which may not be correct -- (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elementary_particle [wikipedia.org]), so they would have the same size. Neutrons have measurable volume (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron [wikipedia.org]), so "about the same" is entirely wrong.
If we suppose you mean mass, then we get a rest mass of about 10^-30 kg for the electron and at most 10^-36 kg for the neutrino (http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/32861 [physicsworld.com]) and around 10^-27 kg for the neutron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron [wikipedia.org]), making you off by many orders of magnitude.
I'm sorry. I just couldn't resist your sig.