Bizarre Six-Tailed Asteroid Dumbfounds Scientists 134
coondoggie writes "Many images from deep space are so cool, weird and unusual it is hard to believe they are real sometimes. This is one of them. Astronomers looking deep into the asteroid belt through NASA's Hubble Space Telescope say they have spotted an asteroid, designated P/2013 P5, with six comet-like tails of dust radiating from it like spokes on a wheel or a spinning garden sprinkler."
How to detect a really bad science writer... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do so many of these stories have things like "dumbfounded" or "baffled" in the title? Are these scientists just standing there, exclaiming to everyone who will listen - "I'm just so gosh-darn BAFFLED!" Not from any scientist I've met - but it's always reported as such, as if unknowns weren't a crucial element of the whole, you know, SCIENTIFIC PROCESS.
Yeesh.
Ryan Fenton
Re:Science. (Score:4, Insightful)
So is it accelerating or decelerating consistently?
And if so is it heading towards us?
We'll have to get a team of older movie stars (like Bruce Willis, Clint Eastwood, John Travolta and William Shatner) to intercept it
Re:And... (Score:5, Insightful)
this is not just knowledge for knowledge's sake. this is part of efforts to observe planetoids and asteroids to determine if there's risk of collision with Earth [minorplanetcenter.net], determining feasibility of mining asteroids for resources [wikipedia.org], or even plain and simple adding to data sets observing how planetoids and asteroids interact with space
a lot of basic science isn't about finding groundbreaking stuff all the time. in fact, if you're doing research only looking for the "groundbreaking stuff", you're doing science wrong. much of science is straight observation. and it is USEFUL.
Re:Well, there's a simple explanation, really. (Score:3, Insightful)
That was my first thought. Hmm. Every time they take a picture of this thing, it's got a jet going in a different direction.... I mean say we took a picture of a UFO way out in space... what would it look like at lowish resolution? a lump of something with jets coming out of it? Maybe. I guess the true test for that is if it's orbit is changing unexpectedly.
Because seriously, even putting aside the possibility of already having taken video/shots of UFOs in space, on the planet, etc., what would our first encounter with one in space be like? A grainy photo of an anomalous object that we figure must be a comet, but boy is it acting strange...