Comet Catalina To Pass By Earth For the Final Time 54
StartsWithABang writes: Originating from the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud, comets are generally thought of as periodic objects, with their initial trajectories having been perturbed by either Neptune, another distant object or a passing star or rogue planet. But most comets aren't periodic; they're transient instead, where a trip into the inner Solar System gives them additional gravitational perturbations, causing them to either fly into the Sun or gain enough kinetic energy to escape entirely. This latter fate is the case for Comet Catalina, which reaches perihelion on November 15th and then heads out of the Solar System after putting on one final show for observers on Earth.
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So would this be the first time that crocodiles have been used to guard a comet?
in b4... (Score:1)
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FTFY
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"it's the fucking catalina comet mixer"
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Collision risk wise... (Score:3)
Re: Halley's Comet (Score:2, Informative)
It's a chaotic system. The odds of the gravitational perturbation increasing the speed of the comet (and by extension, pushing it away and increasing its period) aren't much different than the odds of the perturbation decreasing it. And the effect is small, that a given orbit might bring a comet that has near escape velocity over the edge (as apparently is happening here) but Halley's Comet has nowhere near that.
Re:Halley's Comet (Score:5, Informative)
Why doesn't this happen to Halley's Comet? It gets perturbed by the gravity from the gas giants, yet has managed to retain a period of 74-79 years since 240 BC. That's a lot of trips through the solar system. Because it's a short period comet, it spends more time around the gas giants than a long period comet. That should subject it to more gravitational perturbations, but it's still remained very periodic. Why is that?
Luck, mostly. An object will either be expelled or gravitationally (tidally) torn apart by the sun after a few trips around the solar system, with an exponential distribution describing how many trips it makes. As with all exponential distributions, the curve flattens out to the right, and if any particular object has just the right orbital parameters to make i.e. 10 or 20 or 50 passes, then it's pretty much fallen (by luck) into the sweet spot of orbital resonances to keep making more passes. The chances are astronomically low that any particular object will have this luck, but there is a huge number of objects out there, so some do beat the odds.
Halley's comet is simply one of the few that beat the odds.
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Halley's comet is simply one of the few that beat the odds.
. . . so if we could just figure out how Halley's comet would bet on Fantasy Football . . . we'd be all set for life!
Re:Halley's Comet (Score:5, Funny)
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You know, if office workers paid as much attention to their 401Ks as they do fantasy football, we wouldn't have a retirement crisis...
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#1. Gamify Investing
#2. Profit
Summary doesn't address the most important aspect (Score:4, Funny)
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Slashdot's SJW-article day is tomorrow.
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A picture of Trump with the phrase "PC Sucks!"
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That is so sexist, couldn't the spokesman have been a spokeswoman wearing a blouse? /SJW
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Using shirt and man while complaining about a sexist witch hunt. You and the SJWs deserve each other. Time for some popcorn!
Note to the RIAA and MPAA (Score:5, Funny)
NO Forbes links, please (Score:2)
I see a bad moon risin' (Score:2)
Since comets are portents of doom, you should link to the article on Astrology Today.
My bet is this signals that the Mahdi is going rise and take control of the Caliphate in Iraq.
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Having used NoScript on Firefox, I resisted Chrome until I got this new laptop and really wanted the "full Google." Matrix is great but it seems way fussier in its bl
Yet another NASA lie. (Score:2)
This is really Planet Nibiru coming to invade us with their lizard-men!!!
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Let's launch a mission with an ion thruster, maybe we can save this comet and eventually capture it for ice mining in orbit!
Can't we land anything on it? (Score:2)
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We'd have to grab it or land on it...which means we'd have to match its speed...which means we'd be going fast enough to do this anyway, so why bother grabbing a comet?
Re:Can't we land anything on it? (Score:4, Interesting)
We'd have to grab it or land on it...which means we'd have to match its speed...which means we'd be going fast enough to do this anyway, so why bother grabbing a comet?
This makes Newtonian sense, however I can think of one scenario where we don't need speed up to the comet. Place the spacecraft on its path. Basically instead of trying to catch the comet, we let the comet catch up with us. Not recommended for humans or delicate equipment.
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This comet is moving at 46 km/s:
http://www.heavens-above.com/c... [heavens-above.com]
Earth is moving at 30 km/s, so that is a difference of 16 km/s, or approximately 36k miles/h. Good luck making anything that can survive that kind of impact.
Obligatory car analogy (Score:2)
So it's like saving the effort of walking by standing in the road and letting a bus catch up with you, only very much more so?
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I'm not any kind of physicist or astro.
Can't we use comets like this to send objects out of the solar system? Things like the voyager 2?
No.
Goodbye my friend. (Score:1)
As you drift out into the darkness of the unknown, my solitary friend, I will lay here without you - wishing I could undertake your journey through the great void of space towards distant stars. I wonder, dear comet, what would you think?
I love you.
Catalina we hardly knew ya (Score:2)
*Sniff*
The Ramans do everything in threes. (Score:1)
The Ramans do everything in threes.
A Better Web Site for Comet Catalina (Score:2)
All Gas Giants Are Failed Stars? (Score:3)
Anyone else find this declaration in the article mildly annoying?
Out a little farther, the four gas giants -- themselves failed stars --
At best, one would think that of the four, only Jupiter could even remotely be considered a failed star. I would think the other three don't have nearly enough mass to qualify for such a designation.