Posted on 11/28/2013 8:24:35 AM PST by Errant
NASA will hold a live Google+ hangout on Thursday (Nov. 28) to webcast the solar passage of Comet ISON as it whips around the sun. The webcast will begin at 1 p.m. EST (1800 GMT) and last until 3:30 p.m. EST (2030 GMT). You will be able to watch the webcast live in the window below at the start time. LATEST STORY: Comet ISON Makes Thanksgiving Day Sun Flyby Today: Watch It Live Online
(Excerpt) Read more at m.space.com ...
I don’t know, seems it’s tail should be streaming much more than it is, if it still had much ice left. Perhaps its speed is a factor. More time will tell as it leaves the sun. I’m still leaning toward a packet of heavy element debris and little snowball left. ;)
Your assessment is duly noted....lol
yeah right now I know this....The CDO thing has them baffled now more than ever. The trajectory is fine and calculated correctly by my own estimate but you are right it certainly slowed more than anticipated as the forces were uh inflicted upon it...but ur right there is no talk right now about it.....great question!
here is a perspective of the size of ISON as it headed towards the sun...I am thinking the debris field now is much larger...
http://thelibertydigest.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/2qxxpqq.jpg
fascinating, thank you!
That’s a good pic.
Our luck, ISON went around the sun, all of the ice melted off, the immense speed and gravity forces broke it up into a bunch of smaller chunks.....
And they’re heading right at us like a shotgun blast.
Then.....
Zombies.
WEll some on twitter are calling it Comet Zombie...lol
Here’s a discussion from a the CDO’s head....
“It looks like it disappeared completely,” Pesnell said in a telephone interview. “You see some dust continuing around the orbit, but that could just be large dust particles that haven’t yet evaporated. But there appears to be no source of dust.”
Based on initial observations with the SDO spacecraft, Pesnell believes ISON must have broken up and evaporated before it reach the sun.
“If it had done that near the sun, we would have seen it,” he said. “We see oxygen and pretty much every molecule has some oxygen in it. We should have seen oxygen. The fact that we didn’t see it means that it must have evaporated before it got to where we could see it.”
In the meantime, he added, “We do now have a conundrum — how do we take a half-mile wide comet and turn it into nothing? Where did that go? And I think over the next couple of months we’ll figure that out.”
But later in the evening, updated pictures from SOHO led many to wonder if a large fragment of ISON had managed to survive its brush with the sun. The pictures clearly showed the dust left in the wake of the comet as it approached the sun, and extending on beyond it to a brighter point.
There is a lot of WTF? going on tonight...lol
Indeed there is Despot!
here it is from the horse’s mouth.....this new name may catch on!
Schrödinger’s Comet
Submitted by Karl Battams on Thu, 11/28/2013 - 20:35
I’ll just say this upfront right now: whatever you read in the following blog post, please feel free to assume it is completely incorrect and the truth is actually quite contrary to what I’m saying. It has been - and continues to be - one of those days.
So this will be a relatively brief blog post because we’re up to our necks in media inquiries and attempting to do real science to figure out the mystery that is comet ISON, and Matthew and I are basically the only ones that have abandoned our loved ones on this US national Holiday and continued to work. Here’s what we know so far:
After impressing us yesterday, comet ISON faded dramatically overnight, and left us with a comet with no apparent nucleus in the SOHO/LASCO C2 images. As the comet plunged through the solar atmosphere, and failed to put on a show in the SDO images, we understandably concluded that ISON had succumbed to its passage and died a fiery death. Except it didn’t. Well, maybe...
After perihelion, a very faint smudge of dust appeared in the the LASCO C2 images along ISON’s orbit. This surprised us a little, but we have seen puffs of dust from Sungrazer tails, so it didn’t surprise us enormously and didn’t change our diagnosis. We watched and waited for that dust trail to fade away. Except it didn’t.
Now, in the latest LASCO C3 images, we are seeing something beginning to gradually brighten up again. One could almost be forgiven for thinking that there’s a comet in the images!
Matthew and I are ripping our hair out right now as we know that so many people in the public, the media and in science teams want to know what’s happened. We’d love to know that too! Right now, here’s our working hypothesis:
As comet ISON plunged towards to the Sun, it began to fall apart, losing not giant fragments but at least a lot of reasonably sized chunks. There’s evidence of very large dust in the form of that long thin tail we saw in the LASCO C2 images. Then, as ISON plunged through the corona, it continued to fall apart and vaporize, and lost its coma and tail completely just like Lovejoy did in 2011. (We have our theories as to why it didn’t show up in the SDO images but that’s not our story to tell - the SDO team will do that.) Then, what emerged from the Sun was a small but perhaps somewhat coherent nucleus, that has resumed emitting dust and gas for at least the time being. In essence, the tail is growing back, as Lovejoy’s did.
So while our theory certainly has holes, right now it does appear that a least some small fraction of ISON has remained in one piece and is actively releasing material. We have no idea how big this nucleus is, if there is indeed one. If there is a nucleus, it is still too soon to tell how long it will survive. If it does survive for more than a few days, it is too soon to tell if the comet will be visible in the night sky. If it is visible in the night sky, it is too soon to say how bright it will be...
I think you get the picture, yes?
We have a whole new set of unknowns, and this ridiculous, crazy, dynamic and unpredictable object continues to amaze, astound and confuse us to no end. We ask that you please be patient with us for a couple of days as we analyze the data and try to work out what is happening. We realize that everyone now wants to know if it will be visible in the night sky, and how bright it might be. We really hate speculating right now but if someone were to force us into an answer, we would reluctantly say that at least some faint tail remnant should be visible in the coming week or so. But this is highly speculative so please don’t take this too seriously just yet. We will absolutely post updated info here as soon as we’re more confident, and I will of course continue blogging when I can in the meantime. Just be patient on this and the truth will unfold in time!
And I just want to end on this note: not long after comet ISON was discovered, it began to raise questions. Throughout this year, as many of you who have followed closely will appreciate, it has continued to confuse and surprise us. For the past few weeks, it has been particularly enigmatic and dynamic, in addition to being visually spectacular. This morning we thought it was dying, and hope was lost as it faded from sight. But like an icy phoenix, it has risen from the solar corona and - for a time at least - shines once more. This has unquestionably been the most extraordinary comet that Matthew and I, and likely many other astronomers, have ever witnessed. The universe is an amazing place and it has just amazed us again. This story isn’t over yet, so don’t stray too far from your computer for the next couple of days!
Come on Gip, What do you really think?
Personally I think they just blew it...
The smudging was nothing more than the magnetic storm reducing the calibration of the soho image. The CDO only captures ice and the Ice if there was any was long gone.
In October i posted I thought it would lose 50 percent of it’s mass and I believe that has occurred. Course I also did not know that it was that much of a rock rather than a snowball...lol
Interesting. the pics looked more than just dust.
I’m damn sure no expert, I believe we got ourselves a comet by looking at the images.
Evidently the people at spaceweather have backtracked, and now say (at least some of) the comet seems to have survived:
Looks strong to me, but I’m no expert.
Totally agree....!
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