Comets


Blackbox

Trail of crumbs discovered from potentially hazardous comet


Astronomy Magazine / SETI Institute
Fri, 29 Jul 2011 16:27 UTC
Image
© NASA-AmesThis +2 magnitude February Eta Draconid was filmed by Peter Jenniskens with one of the low-light-level video cameras of the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) station in Mountain View, California, February 4, 2011.
The February Eta Draconids appear to originate from a long-period comet that passes close to Earth's orbit.

The Central Bureau issued a telegram July 10 for Astronomical Telegrams of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announcing that a stream of dust from a potentially dangerous comet impacted Earth for a few hours last February 4.

"This particular shower happens only once or twice every 60 years," said Peter Jenniskens from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute, Mountain View, California. "The stream of dust is always there, but quite invisible just outside of Earth's orbit. Only when the planets steer the dust in Earth's path do we get to know it is there."

Since last October, the SETI Institute has teamed up with Fremont Peak Observatory in San Juan Batista, California, and UCO/Lick Observatory just east of San Jose, California, in monitoring the night sky with low-light video cameras in an effort to map the meteor showers in the sky over the San Francisco Bay Area. They triangulate the meteor trajectories and determine their orbits in space.
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Meteor

Unseen Comet's Orbit Indicates Possible Crash

David Perlman
San Francisco Chronicle
Wed, 27 Jul 2011 23:38 UTC
Observatory
© John Sebastian Russo / The Chronicle 2010The Lick Observatory in San Jose, with the Fremont Peak Observatory and a ground site in San Joaquin County's Lodi, monitors the sky for meteoroids.

A stream of dusty fragments from a comet born in the outermost reaches of the solar system has hit the Earth on a path that leads astronomers to conclude the comet itself could be "potentially hazardous" if it crashes into the planet.

The comet's location is unknown, making it difficult to say when it will approach Earth, but "the orbits of the dust trail tells us that the comet is on a path that could eventually hit us," said Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at the SETI Institute and the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View.

"It's very unlikely," he conceded Wednesday. "Such impacts are extremely rare in Earth's history."

The trail of dust grains, known as meteoroids, were shed by the comet long ago as it passed the sun and Earth on a long orbit that could have taken thousands of years to complete, Jenniskens said.

The comet was born billions of years ago and trillions of miles away in the cold comet nursery called the Oort Cloud, and streams of the comet's dusty progeny have returned to Earth once or twice every 60 years or so when their orbits come under the influence of Saturn and Jupiter, Jenniskens said.
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Meteor

Evidence Found for Undiscovered Comet That May Threaten Earth


Space.com
Wed, 27 Jul 2011 16:30 UTC
New Comet
© All Sky Cameras / Peter JenniskensThis February eta Draconid was filmed by Peter Jenniskens with one of the low-light-level video cameras of the Cameras for Allsky Meteor Surveillance (CAMS) station in Mountain View, California, at 07:59:24 UT on February 4, 2011.

A surprise meteor shower spotted by skywatchers in February was likely caused by cosmic "bread crumbs" left over from an undiscovered comet that could potentially pose a threat to Earth, astronomers announced today (July 27).

The tiny meteoroids that streaked through Earth's atmosphere for a few hours on Feb. 4 represent a previously unknown meteor shower, researchers said. The "shooting stars" arrived from the direction of the star Eta Draconis, so the shower is called the February Eta Draconids, or FEDs for short.

The bits of space rock appear to have been shed by a long-period comet. Long-period comets whiz by the sun only rarely, so it's tough to predict when they last came through our neck of the woods - and when they'll come back, researchers said.

That uncertainty is cause for some concern in this case, they added.

"If the meteoroids can hit us, so can the comet," said FEDs discoverer Peter Jenniskens, of the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center. "We don't know whether the comet has already passed us by or is still on approach."

Still, Jenniskens stressed that the chances of such a collision are extremely remote.
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Meteor

Sun Grazing Comet


Science @ NASA
Wed, 27 Jul 2011 14:59 UTC
A new video from NASA shows the sundiving comet of July 5th interacting with the sun's atmosphere as it evaporates above the stellar surface.

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Sun

SOTT Focus: Connecting the Dots: Cosmic Changes, Planetary Instability and Extreme Weather

Sott Editors
Sott.net
Sat, 23 Jul 2011 14:10 UTC
Image
© NASA / SDOThe Solar Dynamics Observatory's view of the coronal mass ejection of June 7, 2011.
With Earth Changes now clearly happening and time pressing, the editors of Sott.net are faced with the urgency of catching up with an avalanche of significant news items and trying to make sense of things! Recent weather events have been unprecedented: both spring and early summer have been bizarre across the globe, to say the least.

You name the weather or geological type of phenomenon; someone in the world had it: volcanoes, earthquakes, torrential rain, floods, sinkholes, tornadoes, droughts, wildfires ... even summertime snow! Let's review them all as best as we can, starting from the top: the cosmic factor.

Solar Activity
© Mike BormanImage Taken: Jun 4, 2011
Location: Evansville, Indiana, USA
Cosmic Changes Are Under Way

Changes on planet Earth comprise such a wide variety of phenomena, from extreme weather anomalies to volcanoes and earthquakes, so perhaps it's a good idea to zoom back and see if we can make sense of any changes in the cosmic climate that may be affecting us. Yes, we are aware that this approach goes against the sanctioned narrative claiming that these changes are caused by carbon-burning human beings living in an isolated bubble that can only grow warmer. But the pieces of the puzzle on the table point to a different, larger picture.

A huge central piece is our sun, which is not surprising, since this ongoing explosion in space is what brings order to our corner of the universe and to life to Earth. For the last couple of years the sun was expected to go into high activity in accordance with its usual 11-year sunspot cycle. But scientists were left scratching their heads as our local star remained quiet. Now it's giving off such a display of flares that it has NASA scientists going 'ooh and ahh'.
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Meteor

Comet Hartley 2 Leaves a Bumpy Trail


ScienceDaily
Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00 UTC
Image
© NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLAComet Hartley 2 as seen by WISE. Data from the infrared telescope revealed that the comet's trail, seen here as the long, thin yellow line, consists of particles as large as golf balls.
New findings from NEOWISE, the asteroid- and comet-hunting portion of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, show that comet Hartley 2 leaves a pebbly trail as it laps the sun, dotted with grains as big as golf balls.

Previously, NASA's EPOXI mission, which flew by the comet on Nov. 4, 2010, found golf ball- to basketball-sized fluffy ice particles streaming off comet Hartley 2. NEOWISE data show that the golf ball-sized chunks survive farther away from the comet than previously known, winding up in Hartley 2's trail of debris. The NEOWISE team determined the size of these particles by looking at how far they deviated from the trail. Larger particles are less likely to be pushed away from the trail by radiation pressure from the sun.

The observations also show that the comet is still actively ejecting carbon dioxide gas at a distance of 2.3 astronomical units from the sun, which is farther away from the sun than where EPOXI detected carbon dioxide jets streaming from the comet. An astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the sun.

"We were surprised that carbon dioxide plays a significant role in comet Hartley 2's activity when it's farther away from the sun," said James Bauer, the lead author of a new paper on the result in the Astrophysical Journal.
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Sun

Comet's 'death by sun' captured for first time

Tariq Malik
msnbc.com
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:34 UTC
Sun evaporates comet
© NASA / SDO / AIAThe Solar Dynamics Observatory AIA imager (observing in extreme ultraviolet light) actually spotted a sun-grazing comet as it disintegrated over about a 15-minute period on July 6, something never observed before. The angle of the comet's orbit brought it across the front half of the sun. Given the intense heat and radiation, the comet simply evaporated away. The comet was probably a member of the Kreutz sun-grazer family.
Satellite witnesses a 'sun-grazer' hit heat and disintegrate in 15 minutes

The death of a comet that plunged into the sun was captured on camera this month for the first time in history, scientists say.

The comet met its fiery demise on July 6 when it zoomed in from behind the sun and melted into oblivion as it crashed into the star. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), a satellite orbiting Earth that studies the sun, witnessed the comet's death-blow.

One of the SDO spacecraft's high-definition imagers "actually spotted a sun-grazing comet as it disintegrated over about a 15-minute period July 6, 2011, something never observed before," SDO officials said.

Comets have been spotted near the sun before, but last week's object was the first to be observed in real-time as it disappeared.

"Given the intense heat and radiation, the comet simply evaporated away completely," SDO officials said.
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Sun

Recent Sun Activity: Plasma Fountains, Sun-Grazing Comet

Nancy Atkinson
Universe Today
Tue, 12 Jul 2011 13:55 UTC

Interesting activity captured on the Sun early today (July 12, 2011) showing an active region on the Sun's Eastern limb. Plasma was hurled very high above the stellar surface, but didn't have the needed escape velocity and most of the plasma "rained" back down in a fountain. The video shows the activity in different wavelengths.

See below for more views, including the first time a sun-grazing comet was seen disintegrating over the Sun's surface.

The Sun
© Cesar Cantu from Monterrey, Mexico, and the Chilidog Observatory. The Sun on July 11, 2011.
This great ground-based look at the Sun is from July 11, 2011. "A sun a little more active than the past few days, although with much mist in the city, making it impossible to get photos of larger increases," said Cesar Cantu from Monterrey, Mexico, with his Chilidog Observatory. See more at his website, Astronomía Y Astrofotografía.
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Meteor

Best of the Web: Interview with Russian astronomer Leonid Elenin - The discoverer of Comet Elenin

Translation by SOTT
NTV.ru
Wed, 11 May 2011 04:06 UTC
Image
© NTVLeonid Elenin
The following video is a full interview in the Russian language on NTV with the discoverer of Comet C/2010 X1 aka 'Elenin', astronomer Leonid Elenin. Below is the translation of the original interview's transcript available on the Russian TV website.


Comment: Indeed, the hysteria and lies surrounding comet Elenin are ridiculous, and could be dismissed as more "loony talk" if only the similar circus generated around comet Hale-Bopp 15 years ago hadn't led to tragic consequences. See Heaven's Gate mass suicide to understand where those pied pipers in the alt. community are leading the vulnerable.

It's an unfortunate fact that many people do have impressionable minds, easily influenced by paranoid fables bordering on the criminal. Some of them are also part of deliberately orchestrated COINTELPRO campaigns, which are intended to further muddy the waters. Read Elenin, Nibiru, Planet-X - Time for a Sanity Check article for some clarity on this mess.

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Sun

NASA'S SDO Captures Comet Streaking Across the Sun

Phil Plait
Discover
Wed, 06 Jul 2011 00:00 UTC
It's not known how many comets orbit the Sun in our solar system, but the number may be in the trillions. They spend a long, long time in the deep reaches of the outer solar system, only occasionally plunging toward us. If they pass near a planet their orbit can be changed, and some wind up on paths that take them so close to the Sun they burn up. These are called sungrazers.

That is what NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory saw on the evening of July 5/6, 2011. This has been seen many times before, but this is the first time one has been seen streaking directly across the Sun's face!
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