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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Indian astronomers have recently conducted spectrographic observations of long-period Comet Lovejoy to study its gas emission. They found that this comet showcases an asymmetric behavior at perihelion and an increase in the activity during the post-perihelion phase. The findings were detailed in a paper published July 22 on the arXiv pre-print server.
Comet Lovejoy, formally designated C/2014 Q2, is an Oort cloud comet, discovered by Terry Lovejoy in August 2014. Its perihelion was on January 30, 2015 at a heliocentric distance of 1.29 AU, offering astronomers an excellent opportunity to observe its activity—in particular, the emission of numerous organic molecules in gas.
The scientists, led by Kumar Venkataramani of the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad, India, utilized the LISA spectrograph to obtain spectra of the comet. LISA is a low-resolution, high luminosity spectrograph, designed for the spectroscopic study of faint and extended objects. The instrument is installed on the 0.5 m telescope at the Mount Abu Infra-Red Observatory (MIRO), Mount Abu, India.
The observation campaign lasted from January to May 2015. It covered the period during which the comet's heliocentric distance varied from 1.29 AU, just prior to perihelion, to around 2.05 AU post perihelion. The spectra obtained by the researchers show strong molecular emission bands of diatomic carbon, tricarbon, cyanide, amidogen, hydridocarbon and neutral oxygen.
"Various molecular emission lines like C2, C3, CN, NH2, CH, O were clearly seen in the comet spectrum throughout this range. The most prominent of them being the C2 molecule, which was quite dominant throughout the time that we have followed the comet. Apart from the C2 emission band, those of CN and C3 were also quite prominent," the scientist wrote in the paper.
When a cold icy body like the Comet Lovejoy passes by the sun near perihelion, its ices start sublimating, releasing a mixture of gas and dust, which form the coma. Studying these emissions is crucial for scientists as comets could hold the key to our understanding of the solar system's evolution and the origin of life in the universe. Therefore, the abundance of volatile material in comets is the target of many scientific studies that seek to reveal the secrets of planet formation and demonstrate the conditions that occurred when our solar system was born.
Optical Spectroscopy of Comet C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) from MIRO
(Score: 5, Informative) by Immerman on Wednesday July 27 2016, @02:55PM
That level of ugly can't be excused by hand-coding - I've hand coded all the web pages I've made, and have never created something anywhere near that ugly. To get that bad you also need to include bad taste and possibly some mental issues...
It also makes for a horrible link on your part, as it contains essentially zero information about his comet speculations, or anything else really (given initial results from having googled for Plasma Discharge Comet Model I won't give it the dignity of calling his ideas theory), looks to just be an order page to sell his ramblings to the sorts of gullible people who like to feel like they're "in the know" about "suppressed truth". As such, the incoherence and ugliness could well serve the same purpose as the intentionally horrible grammar and spelling in email scams - it filters out the people who might recognize the scam for what it is and cause the scammer wasted time and effort.
Let me offer you an alternative explanation for comet tails: Periodic comets aren't small, except as compared to planets (or their tails, which are *extremely* low density dust clouds in hard vacuum)
Let's take some napkin calculations about Halley's comet as an example - the only comet to give off such a huge tail as to be visible with the naked eye.
Size: 15x8x8km
Mass: ~2.2x10^14kg
Mass loss to tail: ~54 tons/second at closest approach to the sun
Total loss per passage, rough estimate (54 tons/s * 1/3 year): 5.7 x 10^11 kg/passage
Number of passes before all mass lost, at current rates: 2.2x10^14 / 5.7 x 10^11 = 386 passes
Which, given it's ~75 year period means it could be around for another 29,000 years
Even the tiniest comets we've detected are over 100m across (and we should be able to detect much smaller ones, suggesting a real lower limit on size) - and a 100m sphere with a density comparable to Halley's (~0.6g/cm^3) is still 3x10^8 kg. Only a thousandth of the mass that Halley's sheds in a single pass, but the tails of such comets are correspondingly tiny as well, only visible with powerful telescopes. And it's not exactly uncommon for such small comets to shed much of their mass in a single pass, and quite possibly break up so that they can never return as coherent bodies.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Wednesday July 27 2016, @03:08PM
After digesting that one, I'm about to produce a gaseous tail....
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday July 27 2016, @04:16PM
Careful, too many of those will crack you up you'll and be unable to return.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday July 27 2016, @03:23PM
As such, the incoherence and ugliness could well serve the same purpose as the intentionally horrible grammar and spelling in email scams - it filters out the people who might recognize the scam for what it is and cause the scammer wasted time and effort.
Slow news day so I start looking through it and found this. Apparently, it is a feature, not a bug. Just more along the mentally ill line, though. Emphasis mine.
Every web page that emerges such as this web page that brings you a step closer to the truth is immediately duplicated by the FBI CIA NSA etc. Their favorite trick is impersonation and deception as a form of destroying the messages of well meaning people. They copy the message, many times using similar web page names and terms but twisting the message into totally divergent distortions and leaving out important results that they do not want you to think about. How do you tell which pages are real and which are "supported" imposters? It is actually quite simple. Simply look for extensive well polished web pages with staffs of people who work daily and the evident government support such as pictures every day coming from internal NASA files or other government agencies, directly supporting the web pages that allegedly are "fighting" for "truth and justice". Look for people and pages claiming "30 years of research" that were only formed in the last few years with no physical history. Look for people claiming to be degreed professionals but with no degrees or credentials of any kind (when you ask for them they fade into the woodwork like cockroaches when the lights come on). Look for lavish hotel meetings with few showing up. Who is paying for all of this impersonation? The FBI CIA NSA fund such groups under the table and revel in promoting no names who need an ego rush but who otherwise would never get out of grandma's basement. Look for "no physical means of support" for the staff and lavish web pages and supporting pages. Real people do not have such luxuries. These are the imposter pages who take the truth and twist it for public consumption. They then use these people and their web pages as an "opposing" side of a dialectic so they can ignore the real people doing real work.
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Wednesday July 27 2016, @06:48PM
The pain and difficulty of establishing a professional and well-produce presence on the world wide web has never been more expensive and difficult to maintain than it is today.
https://wordpress.com/themes/ [wordpress.com]
You're betting on the pantomime horse...