SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
As Rosetta's comet approached its most active period last year, the spacecraft spotted carbon dioxide ice – never before seen on a comet – followed by the emergence of two unusually large patches of water ice.
The carbon dioxide ice layer covered an area comparable to the size of a football pitch, while the two water ice patches were each larger than an Olympic swimming pool and much larger than any signs of water ice previously spotted at the comet.
The three icy layers were all found in the same region, on the comet's southern hemisphere.
Is the Earth picking up CO2 and water vapor from the comet, or is the comet picking up CO2 and water vapor from the Earth?
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
If little else, the brain is an educational toy.
-- Tom Robbins
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Sunday November 20 2016, @10:24PM
We used to call it "Wormwood". In medieval times there was widespread belief that comets could disperse miasma or somesuch, causing all kinds of trouble on the terrestrial plane. But superstition aside, (and it may have been more a matter of the unpredictable appearance of heavenly bodies, which according to Aristotle, were not supposed to move about at random, and the planets are bad enough, but at least predictable), the medievals may not have been far off. Comets are rather messy when the approach perihelion, they start spewing all that ice into a ball of gas and dust called a "coma", and they actually leave a trail of material behind them. On Earth, these trails appear on occasion as meteor showers, and a certain amount (5-300 metric tonnes/day, http://www.universetoday.com/94392/getting-a-handle-on-how-much-cosmic-dust-hits-earth/?PageSpeed=noscript) [universetoday.com] of material enters earth's atmosphere all the time. So planets acquiring cometary stuffs is no problem, even without "involuntary conversion". This is what superior gravity can do for you! The converse? Don't see it happening.