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| Ultimi arrivi - Asteroids and Comets |
Comets-Wesley-Jupiter_Impact-1.jpgCometary Impact on Jupiter 108 visitenessun commentoMareKromiumGiu 09, 2010
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Meteor-Wiggle.jpgWiggling Meteor76 visiteDalla Rubrica "NASA - Picture of the Day" del giorno 2 Giugno 2010:"Did this meteor take a twisting path?
No one is sure. Considered opinions are solicited.
Meteors, usually sand sized grains that originate in comets, will typically disintegrate as they enter the Earth's atmosphere. A fast moving meteor ionizes molecules in the Earth's atmosphere that subsequently glow when they reacquire electrons. Meteor paths that twist noticeably have been noted before, and even photographed, but attributing such behavior to the motion of the meteor itself and neither the wind-blown meteor train nor the observer remains somewhat controversial.
The above meteor, imaged two weeks ago streaking over the Teide Observatory in Tenerife, Canary Islands, appears to swagger as much as several minutes of arc, which the experienced astrophotographer did not think could be attributed to drifting of the resulting train or motion of the camera mount.
If truly an indication of a twisted meteor path, an underlying reason could be the pictured meteor was markedly non-spherical in shape, non-uniform in composition, or electrically charged. Non-uniform meteors, for example, may evaporate more on one side than another, causing a rotating meteor to wobble.
Understanding meteors is important partly because meteors are candidates to have seeded Earth with prebiotic molecules that allowed for the development of life". MareKromiumGiu 02, 2010
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Comets-Garrad-PIA12985.jpgComet Garradd57 visiteThis image from the WISE mission was taken on January 2nd, 2010, during the check-out phase, before the start of the WISE survey. It is a mosaic of 3 individual WISE frames spanning an area on the sky about 7 times the size of the full Moon in portions of the constellations Bootes and Canes Venatici.
In the lower right portion of the image there is a streak of orange light. This is most likely a human-made satellite, orbiting Earth at a higher altitude than the WISE telescope, which is at 523 km above the surface. WISE sees many of these as it scans the sky.
Just above the satellite in the image is Comet C/2008 Q3 (Garradd). Comets are balls of dust and ice left over from the formation of the Solar System. As a comet approaches the Sun it is heated and releases gas and dust from its surface that is blown back by the solar wind into a long, spectacular tail. This comet was discovered in August 2008 by Gordon Garradd of the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia. This comet probably comes from the Oort Cloud, a vast collection of remnants from the formation of the Solar System thought to surround it. At the time the comet was observed by WISE, in the constellation Bootes, it was a distance of 419 million kilometers (2.789 Astronomical Units, AU) from Earth. But we are just catching it while it is near the Sun. The orbit calculated for Comet C/2008 Q3 (Garradd) is inclined to the plane of the Solar System by nearly 140 degrees and takes it very far from the Sun (trillions of kilometers). It made its closest approach to the Sun in June of 2009 at a distance of 1.8 AU (270 million km), just outside the orbit of Mars. If it comes back near the Sun at all, it won't be for hundreds of thousands of years.
In the upper left of the image is the impressive globular cluster Messier 3 (M3). M3 was discovered in the constellation Canes Venatici by famous French Astronomer, Charles Messier in 1764, and first seen to be made of stars around 1784 by the British astronomer who discovered infrared light, William Herschel. Globular clusters are huge globs of stars (hence the name) that are found orbiting in the outer reaches of most galaxies. They are thought to form around the same time that a galaxy forms. The Milky Way has over 200 known globular clusters. M3 is one of the largest and brightest globular clusters around the Milky Way. It is just barely visible to the naked eye from a dark location. M3 is made of about half a million stars, thought to be about 8 billion years old. It is about 150 light-years across (1 light-year is equal to 9.46 trillion km) and located some 34,000 light-years from Earth.
WISE sees invisible infrared light, and the colors here are mapped to 3 of the 4 wavelength bands observed by WISE. Blue represents light with a wavelength of 3.4 microns, cyan maps to 4.6 microns and red is lightat 12 microns (a micron is 1 millionth of a meter, and visible light runs from 0.4-0.7 microns). The light from relatively hot objects, like stars in M3, is seen in blue and cyan. Red color represents cooler things, like dust from the comet and its tail. When this image was taken the WISE team was still calibrating the rate of the scan mirror with the motion of the WISE telescope. The rate was not yet perfected and careful examination of this image reveals some stars that are a little smeared and not exactly aligned in the blue/cyan with the red.
MareKromiumApr 14, 2010
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Comets-Comet_Siding_Spring-PIA12836.jpgComet Siding Spring61 visiteCaption NASA:"Is it a bird, or a plane? It's comet Siding Spring streaking across the sky, as seen by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE.
The comet, also known as C/2007 Q3, was discovered in 2007 by observers in Australia. The snowball-like mass of ice and dust spent billions of years orbiting in the deep freeze of the Oort Cloud, a spherical cloud of comets surrounding our Solar System. At some point, it got knocked out of this orbit and onto a course that brings it closer to the Sun. Sunlight has warmed the Comet, causing it to shed ices and dust in a long tail that trails behind it.
On October 7, 2009, comet Siding Spring passed as close as 1,2 Astronomical Units from Earth and 2,25 Astronomical Units from the Sun (an Astronomical Unit - AU - is the distance between the Sun and Earth). Now, the comet is leaving the warmer, more hospitable neighborhood of the Solar System and heading back out to chillier parts. In this view, longer wavelengths of InfraRed Light are red and shorter wavelengths are blue.
The comet appears red because it is more than ten times colder than the surrounding stars. Colder objects give off more of their light at longer wavelengths.
An ice cube, for example, pours out a larger fraction of its light at longer InfraRed wavelengths than a cup of hot tea emits".MareKromiumApr 14, 2010
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P-2010-A2-HST.jpgP/2010-A2: Extremely unusually-looking Asteroid57 visiteFirst discovered on ground based LINEAR images on January 6, 2010, the object appeared unusual enough to investigate further with the Hubble Space Telescope last week.
Pictured above, what Hubble saw indicates that P/2010 A2 is unlike any object ever seen before.
At first glance, the object appears to have the tail of a comet. Close inspection, however, shows an about 140-meter Nucleus offset from the tail center, very unusual structure near the Nucleus, and no discernable gas in the Tail. Knowing that the object orbits in the Asteroid Belt between Mars and Jupiter, a preliminary hypothesis that appears to explain all of the known clues is that P/2010 A2 is the debris left over from a recent collision between two small asteroids.
If true, the collision likely occurred at over 15.000 Km-per-hour (five times the speed of a rifle bullet) and liberated energy in excess of a nuclear bomb. Pressure from Sunlight would then spread out the debris into a trailing tail.
Future study of P/2010 A2 may better indicate the nature of the progenitor collision and may help humanity better understand the early years of our Solar System, when many similar collisions occurred. MareKromiumFeb 03, 2010
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Comets-Halley-nucleus.jpgThe Nucleus of Halley58 visiteWhat does a Comet Nucleus look like?
Formed from the primordial stuff of the Solar System, Comet Nuclei were thought to resemble to very dirty icebergs. But ground-based telescopes revealed only the surrounding cloud of gas and dust of Active Comets nearing the Sun, clearly resolving only the Comet's Coma, and the characteristic cometary tails.
In 1986, however, the European Spacecraft "Giotto" became one of the first group of spacecrafts which encountered and photographed the Nucleus of a Comet, when it passed and imaged Halley's Nucleus as it approached the Sun.
Data from Giotto's camera were used to generate this enhanced image of the potato shaped Nucleus that measures roughly 15 Km across. Some Surface Features on the dark Nucleus are on the right, while gas and dust flowing into Halley's Coma are on the left.
Every 76 years Comet Halley returns to the Inner Solar System and each time the Nucleus sheds about a 6-meter deep layer of its ice and rock into space. This debris shed from Halley's Nucleus eventually disperses into an orbiting trail responsible for the Orionids Meteor Shower, which occurs in October of every year, and the Eta Aquariids Meteor Shower, that occurs in May.MareKromiumGen 14, 2010
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KBO-1-Artist_Conception.jpgKuiper's Belt Object occulting a Star59 visiteThis is an artist's impression of a 0,5-mile-diameter Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) that was detected by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The icy relic from the early Solar System is too small for Hubble to photograph. The object was detected when it passed in front of a background star, temporarily disrupting the starlight.MareKromiumDic 21, 2009
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KBO-2-Artist_Conception.jpgKuiper's Belt Object occulting a Star57 visiteNASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the smallest object ever seen in Visible Light in the Kuiper Belt, a vast ring of icy debris that is encircling the outer rim of the Solar System, just beyond Neptune.
The needle-in-a-haystack object found by Hubble is only 3200 feet across and a whopping 4,2 Billion Miles away. The smallest Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) seen previously in reflected light is roughly 30 miles across, or 50 times larger.
This is the first observational evidence for a population of comet-sized bodies in the Kuiper Belt that are being ground down through collisions. The Kuiper Belt is therefore collisionally evolving, meaning that the region's icy content has been modified over the past 4,5 BYs.
The object detected by Hubble is so faint — at 35th magnitude — it is 100 times dimmer than what Hubble can see directly.
So then how did the space telescope uncover such a small body?MareKromiumDic 21, 2009
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KBO-3-Artist_Conception.jpgKuiper's Belt Object occulting a Star57 visiteIn a paper published in the December 17th issue of the journal Nature, Hilke Schlichting of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif., and her collaborators are reporting that the telltale signature of the small vagabond was extracted from Hubble's pointing data, not by direct imaging.
Hubble has three optical instruments called Fine Guidance Sensors (FGS). The FGSs provide high-precision navigational information to the space observatory's attitude control systems by looking at select guide stars for pointing. The sensors exploit the wavelike nature of light to make precise measurement of the location of stars.
Schlichting and her co-investigators determined that the FGS instruments are so good that they can see the effects of a small object passing in front of a star. This would cause a brief occultation and diffraction signature in the FGS data as the light from the background guide star was bent around the intervening foreground KBO.
They selected 4,5 years of FGS observations for analysis. Hubble spent a total of 12.000 hours during this period looking along a strip of sky within 20° of the Solar System's Ecliptic Plane, where the majority of KBOs should dwell. The team analyzed the FGS observations of 50.000 guide stars in total.
Scouring the huge database, Schlichting and her team found a single 0,3-second-long occultation event. This was only possible because the FGS instruments sample changes in starlight 40 times a second. The duration of the occultation was short largely because of the Earth's orbital motion around the Sun.
They assumed the KBO was in a circular orbit and inclined 14° to the Ecliptic. The KBO's distance was estimated from the duration of the occultation, and the amount of dimming was used to calculate the size of the object. "I was very thrilled to find this in the data", says Schlichting.
Hubble observations of nearby stars show that a number of them have Kuiper Belt–like disks of icy debris encircling them. These disks are the remnants of planetary formation. The prediction is that over billions of years the debris should collide, grinding the KBO-type objects down to ever smaller pieces that were not part of the original Kuiper Belt population.
The finding is a powerful illustration of the capability of archived Hubble data to produce important new discoveries. In an effort to uncover additional small KBOs, the team plans to analyze the remaining FGS data for nearly the full duration of Hubble operations since its launch in 1990.MareKromiumDic 21, 2009
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Comets-Comet_Hyakutake.jpgComet Hyakutake58 visiteDa "NASA - Picture of the Day" del giorno 16 Dicembre 2009:"In 1996, an unexpectedly bright comet passed by planet Earth. Discovered less than two months before, Comet C/1996 B2 Hyakutake came within only 1/10th of the Earth-Sun distance from the Earth in late March. At that time, Comet Hyakutake, dubbed the Great Comet of 1996, became the brightest comet to grace the skies of Earth in 20 years. During its previous visit, Comet Hyakutake may well have been seen by the stone age Magdalenian culture, who 17.000 years ago were possibly among the first humans to live in tents as well as caves.
Pictured above near closest approach as it appeared on 1996 March 26, the long Ion and Dust Tails of Comet Hyakutake are visible flowing off to the left in front of a distant star field that includes both the Big and Little Dippers.
On the far left, the blue Ion Tail appears to have recently undergone a magnetic disconnection event. On the far right, the Comet's green-tinted Coma obscures a dense nucleus of melting dirty ice estimated to be about 5 Km across. A few months later, Comet Hyakutake began its long trek back to the outer Solar System.
Because of being gravitationally deflected by massive planets, Comet Hyakutake is not expected back for about 100.000 years...".MareKromiumDic 16, 2009
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ShootingStar.jpgShooting Star72 visiteDa "NASA - Picture of the Day" del giorno 15 Ottobre 2009:"The brilliant fireball meteor captured in this snapshot was a startling visitor to Tuesday evening's twilight skies over the city of Groningen (NL).
In fact, sightings of the meteor, as bright as the Full Moon, were widely reported throughout the Netherlands and Germany at approximately 17:00 UT. Accompanied by sonic booms and rumbling sounds, the meteor was seen to break up into bright fragments, eventually leaving a persistent smoke-like trail.
Even though there are bright fireball meteors in planet Earth's Atmosphere every day, sightings of them are relatively rare because they more often occur over oceans and uninhabited areas".MareKromiumOtt 15, 2009
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Asteroids-Asteroid_1994-CC-PIA12134.gifTriple Asteroid 1994-CC in motion (GIF-Movie; credits: NASA/JPL/GSSR)56 visiteCaption NASA:"Radar imaging at NASA's Goldstone Solar System Radar on June 12 and 14, 2009, revealed that near-Earth Asteroid 1994-CC is a Triple System.
Asteroid 1994 CC encountered Earth within 2,52 MKM (such as 1,56 MMs) on June 10. Prior to the flyby, very little was known about this celestial body. 1994 CC is only the second Triple System known in the near-Earth population. A team led by Marina Brozovic and Lance Benner, both scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., made the discovery.
1994-CC consists of a central object about 700 meters (2300 feet) in diameter that has two smaller moons revolving around it. Preliminary analysis suggests that the two small satellites are at least 50 meters (164 feet) in diameter.
Radar observations at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, led by the center's director Mike Nolan, also detected all 3 objects, and the combined observations from Goldstone and Arecibo will be utilized by JPL scientists and their colleagues to study 1994-CC's orbital and physical properties.
The next comparable Earth flyby for Asteroid 1994-CC will occur in the year 2074 when the space rock trio flies past Earth at a distance of about 2,5 MKM (such as approx. 1,6 million miles). Of the hundreds of near-Earth asteroids observed by radar, only about 1% are Triple Systems".MareKromiumSet 12, 2009
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