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Space

Comet LINEAR Erupts 66

Posted by emmett from the bewm dept.
CalamityJones writes: "This Reuters blurb briefly describes a comet erupting while researchers were tracking it with the Hubble Space Telescope. A slightly more complete article covering the event is on CNN.com. What are the chances of actually catching this event just at the moment you have the earth's most powerful telescope pointing right at the comet? Maybe these guys should be playing the lottery more often. :-)"
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Comet LINEAR Erupts More

Comet LINEAR Erupts

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  • Re:Cut the defense budget (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I love how people think that cutting the defense budget is a good idea. Did you know that the military has deployed more in the past decade than the 20 years before that? They do it with a much much smaller budget. We have cut alot, technology helps us do more with less people/resources. It's starting to reach a breaking point though, you can only stretch the military so thin.

    Small 'rebel' nations are becoming nuclear powers. How would you like to wake up in the morning to news of Los Angles being wiped off the map? Or if you think that only missiles are a threat, consider how easy it is for somebody to buy a mobile russian icbm launcher. During the cold war the united states had one common enemy, now we have dozens. If you think this is a US only problem, unless you live in one of those countries that are a 'rebel' nation, or even if you do, it's a problem. Friends of the enemy, are the enemy.

    I wish we lived in a peacefull utopia, but we don't. Until we do, we need to remember to support that 19 year old in some war torn country trying to preserve our freedom. There are hundreds of them doing their job right now. They're risking their lives even more than they should alot of times because people like you want to cut the defense budget. All on a salary that qualifies some for food stamps.

    Yes, one less aircraft carrier can provide scholarships, but one more can help prevent WW3 where that child could meet his god.

    Yes this was an off topic rant, but I don't care.
  • Poag what the fuck is your problem? You think just because you run some shitty graphic site that nobody cares about you deserve to abuse your fucking +1 and ruin slashdot for us like this? No wonder so many trolls run rampant on this site. It's jerks like you who post this drivel and expect to get rewarded for this. Well fuck you, not only am I using my numerous moderator elligble accounts exclusively to moderate your ass down, I'm going to declare jihad with a trollslap campaign. You're fucking gone, BLOWME GAY POAG.
  • ...This is not Star Trek, and Linix/Perl is not the answer to every problem.

    Well if Linux/Perl is not the answer to every question, then maybe the questions aren't worth asking (big grin).

    Mark Edwards [mailto]
    Proof of Sanity Forged Upon Request
  • Over the years, many comets have been observed going through outbursts such as this. What makes this special is the level of detail that's visible.

    Comet Halley, for example, had several outbursts during it's last pass through the inner solar system, and later on, it even exhibited an outburst near the orbit of Saturn. It's thought that a "heat pulse" moving through the comet caused a phase transition in the solid CO ice, which in turn caused a small eruption.

  • Another freaky thing, I saw my *actual* doctor (not an associate that I usually see) at a gas station in a completely different city

    Was he performing doctor duties or just pumping gas?

  • Why not cut something that is really not needed... the defense budget! One less bomber could feed so many hungry people. One less aircraft carrier could provide thousands of scholarships for at risk children.
  • Your attempt at humor has failed... quite miserably too...
  • I think they could use the Canadarm for that

    god knows we're good at swatting mosquitos

  • As I see it, there are more ground based telescopes, covering a greater (combined) area of the sky than the orbital telescopes, increasing the odds of capturing such an event.

  • It wouldn't depend on resolution at all. Stars are so far away that there is no chance that they can be "resolved" Resolution is important for viewing large objects like nebula, galaxies or close objects like planets.

    What would matter is "field of view" A nova is a bright enough object that it should be observed if it occurs in the field of view of the telescope."

    I suppose what would really matter more is the f-stop of the telescope. Which is probably why commet hunters don't use large deep sky telesopes, but instead gravitate toward Rich Field Telescopes.

    I don't understand your prof's. reasoning though... Perhaps as someone else mentioned, it's a function of the number of instruments... but then it should be much higher than a single of order of magnitude.

  • The question: will these things improve my life?

    The answer: no.

    They might. They might improve the lives of your children, grandchildren or great-grandchildren. Many of the foundations of modern technology were laid by ancient Greek scientists. Knowing that the Earth is round and that it orbits the Sun was not particularly useful to them at the time, but without that knowledge, we would not have communications satellites.

    Personally I think all that money could - and arguably should - be put to better use. Then when things are going better, we can move on.

    The US budget [gpo.gov] for fiscal year 2001 set aside a total of $13.1 billion for NASA. Of that $2 billion is actually used for astronomy. Compare that with $67.5 billion for education, training, employment and social services; $218 billion on Medicaire; $426 billion on Social Security; and $306 billion for National Defense. I would say we do have our priorities straight when it comes to overall spending on scientific endeavors.

  • Now, I have to admit that a majority of my time in astronomy class was spent making the instructor look stupid, but, I seem to remember some little thing about orbital telescopes having significantly more resolution than terestrial ones.

    Net necessarily. A sufficiently large telescope with adaptive optics can outperform the Hubble in terms of resolution. The main advantage to a space telescope is avoiding the atmosphere.

    So, going under this (apparently mistaken) assumption, it would seem that an orbital telescope would give you better odds of observing something.

    As someone else said, it has more to do with number of telescopes and percent of sky covered in a given period of time than resolution.

  • Here at fox, we are already looking forward to Friday's season openning of,"When Comets Erupt".
  • The same guy that programmed the Mars explorer must have written that article... -100 degrees Fahrenheit is -73 degrees Celsius, not -40! In fact, -40 is the only place where Fahrenheit and Celsius temperatures are the same.
    Zorn
  • From what I remember about the maximum resolution of Hubble, it would be capable of resolving features around 20m across on the Moon's surface. But they can't point it at the Moon because the amount of light would overload the more sensitive electronics on board.

    And what would be the point, when 90%+ of the surface of the Moon has been imaged at superior resolution by lunar orbiting satellites already?
  • Yet another reminder, there's things out there we don't understand... yet... This is not Star Trek, and Linix/Perl is not the answer to every problem.
  • Velcro was thought up by an Austrian or Swiss man whose name I don't recall who noticed how the burrs from some of the plants where he walked in the woods with his dogs stuck to his socks. Sorry for the lack of details, this really is not a troll.
  • Were you alive for the "sensationalized media event" around Neil Armstrong, or are we reading from the history books?
  • Hmm it is expensive enough putting anything in space. Can you imagine the cost of putting the worlds biggest telescope in space? Granted the resolution would be pretty nice.
  • Remember what happened to the diosaurs?

    You bet I do! That was a really bad day for all the large lizards. I remember it clearly! Everyone who is 100 million years old does!

    Pinhead.

  • Ok. now that we cleared up the bleeding heart issue ;) I agree NASA's programs may seem 'extravagently expensive' but the sad fact of the matter is that NASA's budget is a small portion of our huge national spending. A better funded NASA would have been able to spend more resources testing equipment and implemeting redundant systems to avoid dome of the miserable failures as of late. The dollar cost for the innovations and discoveries has been high but the initial investment here is paying off. Just look at the advances we have made recently in plasma propulsion which once implemented can indeed be very cheap. National literacy rates and educational levels imho weren't any better back when we were all 'reading books by the fire' and they deserve much more money than our countries feeble attempts at socialistic endeavours. We can get money to improve the education system from budgets other than NASA's. I would say kill welfare and make it workfare so we can use the money for education. This would benefit us twofold: instill the desire to elevate ones education so a workfare job is not waiting for you and provide a labor force to build and maintain a better school system. Other avenues of pursuit to consider: stop the drug war, stop putting people in jail for health problems, stop the criminal profiling that causes blacks unheeded harassment/persecution/incarceration. The money saved here could be vested into the educational system, maybe even to the point where better education about drugs and a decriminalized environment brings about thier ultimate erradication. Americans are funny about educating thier children these days. On the surface its priority one but just underneath the surface we discover our unwillingness to pay out more money to throw at the problem. Childcare systems need more attention too. Teachers are seriously underpaid and for the most part underappreciated. This has got to change but how can you effect change when people are basically unwilling to really take action to make changes happen?Humanity and culture are important but in the new paradigm of the information age I am not sure about how relevant they will be. We are notorious for our ignorance of other cultures but this maybe an issue of isolationism and the fact that at just over 220 years we haven't really developed our own. I spent 6 summers of my childhood in eastern europe and central europe(Hungary mostly, but also Austria, Poland, West Germany and Switzerland) and know that european culture is extremely diverse. This has been changing rapidly in the last two decades(at least perceptually). Are we leaders in this? I don't know(read:hope not). The EC may ultimately end up just like us. I do know that where society has evolved for several hundreds of years there are definetly more relaxed perspectives on what to do today with extra time which in turn propogates the arts, cultural/ancestoral contact and the like. In the US we lack some of the nuclear familial values that reinforce this. A democratic system like ours is a very grand experiment and at the pace we are going it may take 200 more years for any real 'American' culture to evolve.I still have to disagree with you that time spent focusing on scientific minutiae doesn't really benefit us. You are entitled to your opinion and so am I. If I have learned anything from science its this: in the big picture the devil is in the details.
  • Actually, you are right. The military budget is crucial to maintaining a world order. With rougue nations obtaining nuclear capabilities we still need to be able to keep the technical superiority edge as a wild card up our sleeves. Without a serious consistent investment here all could be lost.
  • There can be no true peace as long as there are apocalyptic weapons such as nuclear tipped ICBMs. You can't hug your children with nuclear arms. You are right but if we just laydown the nukes and mothball our military we wont have peace either. A few dozen ICBM's pointed in the right direction are major deterrents to rogue nations and world powers who are bent on conquerring etc. True world peace is an admirable goal. Just not a realistic one seeing that we (read:human beings) are so hell bent on destroying each other.

  • You do realize that, by stating and doing this, you are no better than those you accuse? Plus you deliberately shred the already decimated signal:noise ratio to oblivion because of it.

    Trolls have been running so amazingly rampant on slashdot for the sake of annoying the 'karma whores' or whatever, but guess what really happens: It pisses off those who read and crank up their thresholds further (thus giving some ego gratification to them, if they exist), and the ones that don't see ten gajillion useless posts. Since I stubbornly refuse to bring my threshold up beyond zero, there's only one other option: Don't read the damn comments.

    That's right, this set of trolls and their 'war on slashdot' has had no point except disrupting the people that exist on here.

    Now, to continue, I honestly don't agree with where or what slashdot is right now, so don't blame me for that. Half the articles are worthless but the other half are interesting enough to keep me coming back. (I find the game design articles in particular fascinating, as well as things like this article.)

    Did I mention that I had one of the first hundred hits on slashdot and was viewing back when it was *gasp* Chips and Bits? You know, back when it was a more closely knit community for the first year or two? When the trolls were actually fun to read and not mindless idiotic crapspewers? Before everyone and their mother came in and tore the joint up?

    Now excuse me, I have better things to do than read a bunch of snotnosed maroons and children that feel that running around tearing the joint up for the sake of the problems that exist will cause anything but grief for anyone else. I don't care what moderators do to this post, offtopic though it may be, it had to be said. End rant.

  • Hmmm. I'm responding to this two days after it was posted. I'm sure I'll be heard...

    I find it annoying when people associate rationalism with atheism. Don't they realize they are proving themselves wrong by taking such an irrational approach, making such sweeping generalizations?

    Just because not everyone has the same arrogance or flattened perspective, just because some people are able to admit that there are deficiencies in human perceptions, does this make them ignorant?

    There is a difference between killing God and forcing yourself to forget Him.

  • I wouldn't believe a word of this report. Hubble has been known to be very unreliable, offering poor and innaccurate images. It was more likely to have been a bug crawling across the lens.
  • Um, no. Penicillin was discovered in 1928 by British scientist Alexander Fleming.
  • The question: will these things improve my life?

    The answer: no.

    And it won't yours either, all this is is interesting things to read about. We learn more, yeah, we gain knowledge, great. I'm all for that, but is it going to help us in our lives at all? Absolutely not.

    Now I'm not saying research shouldn't be done, of course it should be, we have to understand and explore our surroundings, but I do think some priorities need to be straightened out. We've got half the world dying in poverty, people getting diseases, not eating right, the environment's going to hell, our governments suck (don't reply on these, everybody has a different opinion, and this isn't even the point here).

    Personally I think all that money could - and arguably should - be put to better use. Then when things are going better, we can move on. There's a ton of things we don't even know about the earth yet, why are we exploring space?

    I'm not at all saying everything should stop, and I don't believe things would get all that better if we worked at it, I'm no idealist. I just think it's a bit odd to be focusing so much energy on things that are lightyears away in some cases, when we can't even control what we have here.
  • See, this is what you get for trying to discuss issues on slashdot, some moron telling you to go read a book. Why should I read this book, how will it further my understanding of the arguments being presented? Then you go and insult me with a generic comment about my abilities to read instead of explaining your point. If you're going to express an opinion of some sort, at least talk and develop it, instead of just throwing insults around. Then perhaps I'll bother taking you seriously.

  • That'd be cool to see a comet, and sometimes I catch a piece of something falling into the atmosphere at about the time I looked up.

    Another freaky thing, I saw my *actual* doctor (not an associate that I usually see) at a gas station in a completely different city. Anyway... I'm happy that astronomers are getting a cool show!

    ----

  • As I recall, an event of this nature from a space-based telescope was somewhere along the lines of 1 in 3.27e5 per year observed. A ground-based telescope would give you odds approximately one order of magnitude more favorable.
    Now, I have to admit that a majority of my time in astronomy class was spent making the instructor look stupid, but, I seem to remember some little thing about orbital telescopes having significantly more resolution than terestrial ones.
    So, going under this (apparently mistaken) assumption, it would seem that an orbital telescope would give you better odds of observing something. Would anyone care to explain to me how a ground based scope would give you an order of magnitude greater chance of observing an event.
    The only explaination that comes to mind would be that a ground based scope could continuously monitor the object, while orbital scopes would have to be timeshared among the various research interests.
  • Hubble isn't the most powerful telescope. It's simply above the vision-hindering atmosphere. That's what makes it special and powerful.
  • Then Linux/PHP/MySQL!
  • Penicillin was also developed by NASA to protect the astronauts from infectious diseases.

    Maybe he was being sarcastic, perhaps in reply to this incorrect (is it really?) comment:

    Did you know a nasa engineer invented the microchip for the apollo missions, sparking 3rd generation computers?

    Because if I'm not mistaken, the microchip was invented by someone who worked for Texas Instrument (whose name I unfortunately can't recall at the moment). Or was it was a different type of microchip?

    Well NASA did invent Velcro, Tang and the pen that could write upside down.

    Need I mention the old funny factoid about them spending a million dollars to come up with that pen, while the Soviets brought pencils to space with them?

  • Oh no, the Hubble telescope's really a mini death-star.

    Oh my God, they killed the comet - you bastards.
  • I don't belive it, those bugs made it, with their little tiny space suits aswell...I always thought it would be the dolphins.
  • ... NASA pays for all of their expensive missions?

    They play with the lottery all the time

  • Penicillin was also developed by NASA to protect the astronauts from infectious diseases.
  • ..In the middle of the CNN [cnn.com] story:
    1. "Scientists have several theories"
    Its so zen.. Some sort of a CNN Koan.. I'm going to go meditate on that one.. "Scientists have several theories" ..Yeah..


    --------------------------------------
  • I think that at some point the need for a smaller computer would have arose, prompting scientists to develop the microchip. Granted, the space program did hasten its development, but I think it was obvious as it were that large bulky computers would never be practical. And to be honest, what did we really get out of the Apollo missions except a Tom Hanks movie and a sensationalized media event around Neil Armstrong?

  • ...umm, correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't Reagan's "Star Wars" fiasco designed to attack nuclear wepons? Not that it could have ever worked for anyone but the defence contractors...
  • I didnt know there were comets with active volcanoes. Correct me if im wrong, but i thought they were all dead? maybe im thinking of asteroids - im certainly no astronomer.
  • right then... Just one more piece of proof that there is no intelligent life on Earth
  • Why the hell did you spend money on that computer, money on isp charges, and money on a kitchen table, chairs, and maybe a tv/vcr?!?

    Because I am a selfish bastard, thinking only of myself. One thing I don't spend my money on, though, is means to kill my neighbor.

    In any case I think it's funny how much we spend on defense as compared to other programs. Furthermore, I didn't say that we should spend everything on feeding hungry people, I just argued why not cut the defense budget a bit and help out others? Rather than spending money on killing, why don't we spend it on helping? You are trying to turn my statement into a black and white argument. It's not... I'm not saying either spend everything on defense or everything on helping other people... I'm saying, just cut back a bit on defense and reallocate that money to help folks.

  • Before WWII was over, after a war our country demobilized... a lot. Maybe we shouldn't be the World's police force... Maybe we should set an example by cutting back our military presence and increasing our humanitarian presence...
  • NASA should build an anti-troll gigawatt orbiting laser platform.

    How can NASA spend billions on X while children are starving in blah, blah, blah...

    clickety, click, click

    LASER CHARGING...

    ZAP!

    I want to see Natalie Portman, naked and $F*($G
    NO CARRIER

  • You jest, of course, but the fact is there is Asteroid & Comet Impact Hazards [nasa.gov] information at NASA and a consortium of astronomers called Spaceguard Project [nasa.gov] that is attempting to locate and evaluate as many potentially dangerous objects out there as they can, so that in the event we determine one is a danger, we can do something about it [nasa.gov].

    Until then it's a pretty random event that we may or may not need to worry about, on a scale of "during the whole of human civilization". From my perspective, this warrants caution and contingency planning but no real action so far. The fact is that the earlier we find a potentially-colliding object, the simpler it is to deal with; a minor orbital deflection, perhaps by a nuclear weapon, perhaps by a lander with a big-ass rocket engine, may be enough to eliminate any future concerns of a collision.
    ----
  • ...maybe comets erupt more often than we think. How often in the past have we had the ability to resolve the detail of a plume ejected from an erupting comet?

    -AP
  • NASA Images! [stsci.edu] And of the comet!

    .sig
  • More photo links (direct): Picture 1 [stsci.edu]
    Picture 2 [stsci.edu] (Good One)
    Picture 3 [stsci.edu]


    .sig
  • Nice troll (as per topic). But the "as anyone who's seen Deep Impact or Armageddon knows" part just completely blew your cover. You didn't even have to defend Reagan's Star Wars at the end, but it was a nice closing touch.

    Don't worry, though. I bet that some moderator will still take this seriously and mod you up as "Insightful", not "Funny".

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The persuit of knowledge and the betterment of all people by it doesn't count as "betterment of the nation" in your book?

    What planet do you live on?
  • >Small 'rebel' nations are becoming nuclear powers. How would you like to wake up in the morning to news of Los Angles being wiped off the map?

    That would be pretty cool actually. Not only would a small rebel nation come up with a nuke way better than anything we have, but then we FINALLY have a target that nobody would argue with. Considering the cost of getting rid of aging nukes, I can see the White house wondering how many hundreds of nukes to rain down on that rebel country.

    Later
    Erik Z
  • And deathly shy! How many more interplanetary balls of dirt must die before we stop this cruel exploitation? Boycott the Hubble Space Telescope now!
  • Assuming you are not a troll and respecting your right to speak...You see this money as being burned up? OK. do the world a favor and throw away your cellphone, vcr, remote controls, and be sure to return that personal computer you posted the message with. These are technological advances that you can't live without today and they all have thier origins in the space program. Read this, [nasa.gov] this, [nasa.gov] and all of this [nasa.gov] and then reflect upon your money burning up. Its great to feel a compassion for your fellow man but don't confuse the issue. If you want socialism and the like then advocate it as you see fit this is a free speaking democracy afterall. You wouldn't get my support and I am sure there are millions of ignorant people with bleeding hearts that seem to 'think' the way you do.In a democracy its not everyones obligation or responsibility to pay the bill for feeding the lazy, the overbreeders or the willfully undereducated of our society. Yet that is were I see my tax dollars burning. I would rather see my tax dollars get spent on the space program than our great war on drugs, welfare, socialized medicine, etc. which ultimately will not reflect our advances but our lack thereof. What you should be getting mad about is the fact that the prison system is the 6th largest growth industry in the US. We spend billions of dollars waging a ludicrous 'war' on drugs (which is largely a health issue not a criminal one) that is incarcerating people at an unprecedented rate and forcing the system to release violent offenders to squeeze in another 'drug' criminal with a mandatory sentence. We encourage overpopulation by increasing welfare benefits for mothers who have more and more children and never give them any incentive to change (read:why would you work if you got free money and free food?). Our country has great potential, for example, I see people wash ashore here in S.Florida all the time, not a penny to thier name and yet they start businesses and forge themselves a niche to survive in. Yet all the time I hear people like you bitch about how we have to feed the hungry, house the homeless etc. and I see people who have spent thier entire lives here saying there is no opportunity here. Don't you think that the folks out there who don't make that niche for thier existence will become part of the natural selection process that governs the nature of all things?Be sure to work extra hard today there are millions out there who are dependant on your tax dollars as thier source of income. A few % of your pennies will go to advancing the science of mankind and the rest of the dollars will feed people who didnot contribute to advancing anything other than thier laziness.

  • You do make some good points, but ultimately I must disagree. It is in our very nature to explore. We feel impelled to reach and discover and push the boundaries. I think that when we push the barrier that is when we learn about ourselves.

    The amount of money spent on the space program is insignificant. The loss of one of the Martian probes was around 60 to 70 cents per American. My friend today spent that much adding cheese to the top of his burrito at lunch. I'm guessing that nearly the same amount of money was wasted on that movie "Battlefield Earth." Tons of tax dollars are wasted daily by the government at all levels, and getting rid of the space program wouldn't do a bit of good.

    Look, I know that there are ancillary benefits that we probably wouldn't have had otherwise. But the main reason why we should go up into space is the same reason why your Hunter-gatherer ancestor went over that next ridge. Simply because we need to.

  • I did a bit of my graduate work in astronomy and I remember one professor of mine who was especially fond of gambling and other sorts of oddsmaking. In any case, I remember working with him at one point in which he calculated the probability of directly observing any number of astronomical phenomena.

    As I recall, an event of this nature from a space-based telescope was somewhere along the lines of 1 in 3.27e5 per year observed. A ground-based telescope would give you odds approximately one order of magnitude more favorable.

    Incidentally, the chances of observing the start of a supernova in a local cluster star were approximately 1 in 6e9 per year observed via a space-based telescope. Hey, one never knows, it might happen :)

    (Naturally, all previous calculations assume observation at the moment of local occurence. Of course, it's easy enough to reorient a telescope for a major event such as the ones mentioned.)

    yours,
    john

  • Schrodinger's cat lives! (Score:3)

    by Morgaine ( 4316 ) on Saturday July 29, 2000 @03:33AM (#895896)
    They've got this all wrong. It wasn't a chance coincidence that the comet erupted when they trained Hubble on it. The act of observing it caused its wave function to collapse, and the cat said "Miaow!".

    Sheesh, even scientists are forgetting their physics these days.

  • Most powerful? (Score:3)

    by Syberghost ( 10557 ) <.syberghost. .at. .syberghost.com.> on Saturday July 29, 2000 @06:56AM (#895897)
    Hubble isn't the world's most powerful telescope.

    It's the most powerful telescope in space that's pointing away from the planet, that's all.

    --
  • This is the most incredibly stupid thing I've ever heard. I mean, rock-hard stupid. Dehydrated rock-hard stupid. It goes beyond the stupid we know into an entire new quantum definition of stupid. Trans-stupid stupid. Meta stupid. Stupid collapsed on itself so far that even the neutrons have collapsed. Stupid so dense no intellect can escape. Cosmic singularity stupid. Scorching mid-day on Mercury stupid. You emit more stupid in one nanosecond than all of Slashdot emits in a year. Quasar stupid.

    This has to be a troll. No one could be this stupid. I must have nothing better to do than reply to this drivel. Duh.

    (Penicillin was developed in the 1930s by Flory and Chain. NASA was still 20+ years away.)


    THS
    ---

  • Coicidence? (Score:3)

    by InfoCynic ( 71942 ) on Saturday July 29, 2000 @04:10AM (#895899) Homepage
    Maybe it wasn't just a coincidence. Maybe this was actually a test of Hubble's new weapons system. Doesn't anyone else find it a little convenient that NASA "happened" to be looking in the right direction at the right time? Today, LINEAR, tomorrow, target practice in the Asteroid Belt. Just wait until Pluto blows up!

    "Recta non toleranda futuaris nisi irrisus ridebis"

  • Re:I thought comets were all dead? (Score:4)

    by DHartung ( 13689 ) on Friday July 28, 2000 @08:49PM (#895900) Homepage
    I didnt know there were comets with active volcanoes. Correct me if im wrong, but i thought they were all dead? maybe im thinking of asteroids - im certainly no astronomer.

    Dead? Well, they're not tectonically active, really. Only planets with hot molten metal cores can do that, and comets are generally balls of rock and ice that spend most of their lives way out in the Oort cloud beyond Neptune. Io is a small planet in its own right, but the main reason it's volcanically active is the constant push-pull gravitational pressures of Jupiter.

    Anyway, as comets swing down close to the sun, which is what makes them comets to us, they constantly slough off material due to similar heating and gravitational pressure by the sun. Whatever held them together ... ice, mostly ... cracks and degrades. (This is possibly why the granddaddy of all comets, Halley, was pretty unspectacular on its most recent visit: there just isn't as much of it anymore.) What this event with LINEAR showed is that (unsurprisingly) this process is not a long even one but pretty chaotic and stochastic.

    In short: no volcanoes. Just melting, dirty ice.
    ----

  • LINEAR info (Score:4)

    by diagnosis ( 38691 ) on Friday July 28, 2000 @09:45PM (#895901) Homepage
    here's a pretty excellent web page which keeps track of LINEAR/has images (though it doesn't seem to have the explosion images quite yet).

    http:// www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/comet_l inear_2000_sr.html [space.com]

  • Internet Coverage on this story (Score:4)

    by Fraser Cain ( 203191 ) on Friday July 28, 2000 @09:19PM (#895902) Homepage

    Here are links to this story around the Internet:

    Hubble and Chandra imaged the comet in early July and saw a house sized chunk come off the comet:
    NASA Press Release [nasa.gov]

    A British telescope imaged the comet in late July as it completely vapourized:
    Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes Press Release [ing.iac.es]

    Finally, here are links to the CNN article, and everywhere else on the Internet I could find:
    Astronomy Now [spaceflightnow.com]
    CNN Space [cnn.com]
    Space Online [flatoday.com]

    And, of course, my own coverage on Universe Today [universetoday.com].

    Fraser Cain

  • Re:Freaky chance stuff happens... (Score:5)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 ) on Friday July 28, 2000 @08:59PM (#895903)
    > Another freaky thing, I saw my *actual* doctor...

    That's nothing. One time I clicked up a Slashdot story just after it was posted late at night, and there were more serious repliers than there were trolls.

    What are the odds of that happening?

    --

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