Bizarre Six-Tailed Asteroid Dumbfounds Scientists

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."

It ain't no swastika.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Carl Sagan's book Cosmos, theorizes that sometime within the last 10 or 20 thousand years, a comet with four bright tails, came to wards the Earth in an end-on view. That would look like a Swastika. That shape has been recorded in Chinese manuscripts of comet descriptions. It must have made profound impact on human psyche because of so many associations of the Swastika symbol with supernatural and power.

So I was looking for some spectacular six tailed swastika there, but, meh, some smokey trails.

Re:How to detect a really bad science writer...

[glwtta]

They certainly don't use the word "baffled", but for all the scientist I know, the standard response to new data is "WTF is this shit?!"

Why tails not spirals?

[arthurpaliden]

If it was spinning then would the discharge be in a spiral(s) rather that individual tails?

Re:And...

[ColdWetDog]

What do you want? Something engraved in stone tablets? Gold Tablets? Carefully painted in whole wheat linguini?

Anything not coming directly from your deity of choice is going to be a rationalization. Get used to it.