Comets

Comet Lulin Update

Space Weather
Sun, 08 Feb 2009 17:17 UTC

Comet Lulin (C/2007 N3) is approaching Earth for a 38-million-mile close encounter on Feb. 24, 2009. At the moment it is glowing like a 6th magnitude star, dimly visible to the unaided eye and a fine target for binoculars and backyard telescopes.

Comet Lulin is now visible to the naked eye from dark-sky sites. "This morning, Feb 6th, I noticed a faint smudge above Zubenelgenubi," reports Jeff Barton from the Comanche Springs Astronomy Campus in West Texas. "I then trained my 9x63 binoculars on the fuzzy patch. Yep, nailed it! I was thrilled to finally bag Comet Lulin without optical aid."

'Comets Responsible for Originating Life on Earth'

The Hindu News
Sun, 08 Feb 2009 15:30 UTC

There is growing evidence that life on earth has come from the universe through comets, an eminent British scientist said here.

"Life is cosmically abundant and was brought to the earth by comets and our genes and those of all living forms on earth were brought by comets, neatly-packaged within cosmic microorganisms," professor N Chandra Wickramasinghe, Director, Cardiff Centre for Atrobiology, Cardiff University, said.

The astrobiologist speaking at Nehru Planetarium said, "Our genetic ancestors still lurk amidst the stars, and molecular biology is being deployed to trace connections between different species in search of a Last Universal Common Ancestor (LUCA) for all life on the Earth."

Comet Lulin's Disconnected Tail

Space Weather
Thu, 05 Feb 2009 19:23 UTC

On Feb. 4th, a team of Italian astronomers witnessed "an intriguing phenomenon in Comet Lulin's tail." Team leader Ernesto Guido explains: "We photographed the comet using a remotely-controlled telescope in New Mexico, and our images clearly showed a disconnection event. While we were looking, part of the comet's plasma tail was torn away."

Did a comet strike Earth, leaving crystalline dust in the Oklahoma Panhandle?

The Oklahoman
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:27 UTC

A giant comet slammed into the atmosphere and fractured. The resulting swarm of fragments also exploded, scattering tiny diamonds in widely separated locations and plunging the warming Earth into a renewed and deadly deep freeze.

When Leland Bement first heard the theory, "I was highly skeptical," he said. "You just roll your eyes."

But a discovery in the Oklahoma Panhandle changed his viewpoint. It began when Bement, research archaeologist with the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey, was contacted by a team of scientists who had read about Bement's research. For years, Bement had been studying remnants of Indian communities that existed around the end of the last Ice Age - about 13,000 years ago - in the area that is now the Panhandle.

Where Do Comets Come From?

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:30 UTC

© Walter Pacholka, Astropics/SPL
Hale-Bopp, seen here from Joshua Tree National Park, California, was one of the brightest comets of the 20th century.

Few cosmic apparitions have inspired such awe and fear as comets. The particularly eye-catching Halley's comet, which last appeared in the inner solar system in 1986, pops up in the Talmud as "a star which appears once in seventy years that makes the captains of the ships err". In 1066, the comet's appearance was seen as a portent of doom before the Battle of Hastings; in 1456, Pope Callixtus III is said to have excommunicated it.

Modern science takes a more measured view. Comets such as Halley's are agglomerations of dust and ice that orbit the sun on highly elliptical paths, acquiring their spectacular tails in the headwind of charged particles streaming from the sun. We even know their source: they are Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) tugged from their regular orbits by Neptune and Uranus.

But there's a problem. Certain comets, such as Hale-Bopp, which flashed past Earth in 1997, appear simply too infrequently in our skies. Their orbits must be very long, far too long to have an origin in the Kuiper belt. The conclusion of many astronomers is that the known solar system is surrounded in all directions by a tenuous halo of icy outcasts, thrown from the sun's immediate vicinity billions of years ago by the gravity of the giant planets.

New comet may be visible with the naked eye

Jessica Griggs
New Scientist
Fri, 30 Jan 2009 16:12 UTC

© Giovanni Sostero and Ernesto Guido, Remanzacco Observatory
Comet Lulin as seen on 2 January 2009. The image shows both the tail and the anti-tail.

Late next month Earth will receive a new celestial visitor named Lulin - or Comet C/2007 N3 - which astronomers say may have never visited this corner of the solar system before and should be visible to the naked eye.

Comets are icy clumps of dust and small rocks left over from the beginnings of the solar system. As they near the Sun some of the outer layer of ice is vaporised, releasing gas and solid debris that fans out into a tail pointing directly away from the Sun.

Astronomer and author Gary Kronk, based in St Jacob, Illinois, estimates that by 24 February, Lulin's gas tail should appear as long as around eight times the diameter of a full Moon. At that time it will be a mere 38 million miles from Earth, almost as close as Mars reaches to our planet.

Mammoth-Killing Comet Questioned

Jason Palmer
BBC News
Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:49 UTC

A study of wildfires after the last ice age has cast doubt on the theory that a giant comet impact wiped out woolly mammoths and prehistoric humans.

Analysis of charcoal and pollen records from around 13,000 years ago showed no evidence of continental-scale fires the cometary impact theory suggests.

However, the results showed increased fires after periods of climate change.

Italian spots new comet

ANSA
Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:24 UTC

Rome - An Italian astronomer has kept up an amazing spotting streak with his ninth comet in just over a year.

Andrea Boattini, who broke the 150-year-old Italian record for comet spotting with seven last year, said he spotted the new body in the early hours of the night while he was scanning all the Near Earth Objects (NEOs) currently visible.

''I wasn't too sure it was a comet straight away because it was hazy but the skies cleared a bit later and allowed me to confirm the comet's nature,'' said Boattini, 39, who works at the Mount Lemmon Observatory in Arizona on a NASA programme to identify objects that could potentially pose a threat to the Earth.

Cosmochemists Share Results of Cometary Dust Analysis

Steve Koppes
Chicago Chronicle
Mon, 26 Jan 2009 16:30 UTC

© NASA
Steve Simon and Lawrence Grossman of the Geophysical Sciences Department analyzed some of the first samples of a comet ever returned to Earth by a spacecraft. The artist’s rendering above shows the Stardust spacecraft during its close encounter with comet Wild 2, during which the samples were collected.

University cosmochemists Lawrence Grossman and Steven Simon have studied scores of meteorites during their careers, with a few Apollo lunar samples thrown in for good measure. But until 2006, they had never before examined a verified sample of a comet.

Much to their surprise, what they found looked a lot like components of some of the meteorites in their research collection.

"The thing that strikes me about the sample is how similar the mineral identities and the chemical compositions are to the things that we find in carbonaceous chondrites," said Grossman, Professor in Geophysical Sciences and the College.

These meteorites contain material that has been unaltered since the birth of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. The cometary grains differ from carbonaceous chondrites in their complete lack of water-bearing minerals, however.

Lulin comet can be sighted with moderate telescopes

Meri News
Sun, 18 Jan 2009 18:12 UTC

In February, the Earth will have a visitor. The Comet Lulin is going to cut through the planet's orbit by the end of next month. The comet will be seen to naked eyes in the East and South-East of the morning sky. The comet was discovered in 2007.

Comet Lulin is already visible before dawn between the constellations Scorpio and Libra and can be sighted in the East to South-East morning sky with telescopes.

Comet Lulin, with two tails, is said to be a visual phenomenon when it cuts across Earth's orbital plane in late February.

Amateur astronomers claim to have spotted the comet through their mid-sized telescopes despite it's being faint at the moment.

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Comets

Comet Lulin Update

'Comets Responsible for Originating Life on Earth'

Comet Lulin's Disconnected Tail

Did a comet strike Earth, leaving crystalline dust in the Oklahoma Panhandle?

Where Do Comets Come From?

New comet may be visible with the naked eye

Mammoth-Killing Comet Questioned

Italian spots new comet

Cosmochemists Share Results of Cometary Dust Analysis

Lulin comet can be sighted with moderate telescopes

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