Posted on 11/20/2017 10:52:40 AM PST by epluribus_2
I’ll have to take your word since I have never seen bear scat, at least that I know of. 8>) But yes it does look like that from some kind of donor. 8>)
Yeah, how would it get that shape?
Here's a photograph of the thing:
It's the little dot in the middle. The streaks are stars, smeared by telescope motion to track the object.
You & bar sin·is·ter are thinking along the same lines, and now that you both mention it, it does look like a stogie. 8>)
Rama. Let’s rendezvous with it.
It’s 400 meters long ad about 60 meters across.
If it were to hit earth at 10,000 mph it will kill every living thing.
It would be fun to put an Hawaiian and a vowel-deprived Bosnian in the same room...
Bear scat has little bells in it.
The streaks created by the stars are a nice touch though. 8>)
It’s pronounced ‘Yo Mama’
It’s actually doing 95,000 kph...about 60,000 mph.
We’d never know what hit us.
Little bells huh, do they ring?
Its spectral signature, in the visible and near-IR wavelengths. Click HERE for link to "Sky and Telescope" article. I'm not sure how we're supposed to interpret a reflectance greater than 1. The data are pretty sparse, with huge error bars.
Here's a color composite image, from the "Gemini South" telescope:
This graph shows its varying brightness:
And less than 0. Also, what exactly is a "normalized reflectance"? Normalized to what?
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A reflectance greater than one is caused by a conductive object traveling through a magnetic field. Due to its great speed, it is a massive generator, and the object takes on a very high voltage charge. When that voltage leaks away in a coronal discharge, it generates light. Kinda like a weak arc lamp.
This causes it to be brighter than simple reflectance.
I don't know. I can speculate: Reflectance is always measured relative to some reference; either a calibrated reflector or a calibrated source. They may be able to use the sun as a constant, known source. Hence, normalized to solar irradiance at some specific distance from Sol. However:
1) The thing is small and distant. Total light coming from it is very little, requiring long integration times to get any usable signal.
2) The thing is moving very fast, thus illumination on it is changing rapidly relative to integration time.
3) The thing seems to be spinning, varying both the presented surface and presented area rapidly relative to integration time.
4) The thing is small relative to pixel size. Are we seeing multiple pixels on it, or just a point spread function? (I don't know the answer to that.) This calls into question whether all measurements are of the same material. Material variations over the surface of the object are unknowable with available data.
All of this adds up to the huge error bars shown on the graph. Trying to glean meaning from its shape other than the slope is probably not supportable.
Space spliff
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