Note: See updates below for the ISON ISOFF ISON nature of this comet that has everybody guessing. Picture at right also updated to reflect the new “zombie” status of this comet.
Looks like ISON has disintegrated during its turn around the sun. Given the radiation (estimated temperature 5,000F/2,760C – hot enough to vaporize rock), solar wind, and the tidal-forces (even though smallish, thanks Gavin) associated with its proximity and nearly 800,000 mph speed around the turn about that time, I’m not surprised. Watch the second video below where it goes “poof” (h/t to reader “David”)
NASA’s spaceweather.com reports:
Comet ISON is making its closest approach to the sun, and evidence is mounting that the nucleus of the comet has disintegrated. Watch the head of the comet fade dramatically as it approaches the sun in this SOHO coronagraph movie:
(may take a minute to load)
![sundiver_anim3[1]](http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/sundiver_anim31.gif)
The movie spans a day and a half period from Nov. 27th (01:41 UT) to 28th (15:22 UT). In the early hours of the 27th, Comet ISON brightens dramatically, saturating the pixels in the digital camera of the SOHO’s coronagraph. By mid-day on the 28th, however, the comet’s head appears to fade. This is a sign that the nucleus has likely fallen apart. That would make ISON a headless comet–more appropriate for Halloween than Thanksgiving.
Researchers working with the Solar Dynamics Observatory report that they are seeing nothing along the track that ISON was expected to follow through the sun’s atmosphere.
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UPDATE: Watch it go “poof” here:
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UPDATE2: NASA JPL Insider Amy Mainzer tweets some last minute hope that ISON may be “undead”
http://twitter.com/AmyMainzer/status/406179229487742976
A zombie comet, how cool is that?
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UPDATE3: Now it seems back again, but looking entirely different than before. A number of astronomers indicate they don’t know what is left of it, maybe a chunk, maybe a smooshed drawn out nucleus or something else. Image from SOHO’s coronagraph:
geran says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:24 pm
I’m so jealous. My only groupies are bill collectors.
But, unfortunately, bill collectors tend to think for themselves….
Doing your thinking for you, perhaps. Try to stick to worthwhile comments…
practice what you preach there bubba
That song was way cooler than I ever even knew.
Wiki..
Jakob Dylan, the lead singer and songwriter of The Wallflowers, has said that the song is about “the death of ideas”[2] and that the many metaphors and images in the lyrics were not meant to be taken literally. Dylan explains that he and the band had very little support when they were putting together the record, hence the shout-out “c’mon try a little.” The last two lines of the chorus “we can drive it home / with one headlight” are a reference to how the band were able to get through with their ideas despite being hindered (i.e. with one headlight) by the lack of support.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Headlight
geran says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:35 pm
practice what you preach there bubba
My record here speaks for itself. I think yours does too.
Carla says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:39 pm
a reference to how the band were able to get through with their ideas despite being hindered (i.e. with one headlight) by the lack of support.
If the idea is hindered by the lack of facts, lack of insight, lack of knowledge, it will never get through, no matter how many headlights it has.
So I suppose that we wont be discussing how peturbations to the Oort cloud, bring these comets sailing in freefall through the entire f solar system to the lower corona of the sun, with there different trajectories at different times of the solar cycle.
ok
lsvalgaard says:
November 29, 2013 at 3:33 pm
“…If the magnetic field in the solar wind changes direction, e.g. switches polarity as a current sheet is passing the comet, the solar wind will steal the tail. Another one grows out rapidly.”
Yes, I agree with that, though, because a comets nucleus produces an ion tail, it has a polarity induced by the magnetic field in the solar wind, so, when the solar wind switches polarity does the orientation of the comets nucleus change in direction, resulting in the shape of its ion tail to change.
If the physical orientation of the comets nucleus changed fast enough, wouldn’t this result in a reduction of the comets tail?
Carla says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:45 pm
So I suppose that we wont be discussing how perturbations to the Oort cloud, bring these comets sailing in free fall through the entire solar system to the lower corona of the sun, with there different trajectories at different times of the solar cycle.
No we won’t as there is no substance to discuss. Your reference has eight comets which as it says ‘happened to be mostly around solar max’ simply because that was when they were observed. The Oort cloud is WAY outside the heliosphere and knows absolutely nothing about solar max or min.
I think you can understand that different comets will have different trajectories at different times. It would be a miracle if they had equal trajectories.
lsvalgaard says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:43 pm
geran says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:35 pm
practice what you preach there bubba
My record here speaks for itself. I think yours does too.
>>>>>>>>
You’re exactly right, your record speaks for itself.
(Also, as you wrote, try to stick to worthwhile comments.)
But, isn’t the full case different , at different times of the comet’s lifetime, at different distances from the sun?
The inverse square law alone means the net radiation or net total simple ion impact effect varies by the square of the distance from the sun’s surface – not just its distance from the center), and the random variations of the comet’s breakup particles, AND the force/mass ratio (an ion of a sub-microscopic size is going to be affected differently in a charged gaseous stream than a gravel-sized mass struck by the same flow, and each of those will vary greatly from an single ice or vapor particle hitting a charged particle.
You mentioned that there are usually 3x comet tails as a normal comet with a “normal” average breakup ratio of comet mass/comet disintegration rate approaches the sun. All three string “back” away from the sun at different angles and at different rates. It makes “physical” Newtonian and a particle-repulsion sense. The comet on average is breaking up into a random number of particles, and each particle will get “blown away” from the sun at different rates. Eventually, all three comet trails will (on average) finally sort out into three visible tails (and the tens of billions of particles too small to detect visually or by IR will be just that – invisible to the detector, and all of them at different trajectories).
So in this case, all of the comet trails got disintegrated as they went so close to the sun’s “atmosphere”. All of tails were were missing, but the comet mass was too small to see until enough particles of the right size finally were averaged together to be (on average) again detectable – each size particle at a different time since the closest approach, but each particle moving in its “straight line” final trajectory: the unique combination of the initial trajectory x mass x velocity vector PLUS the integration of all of the particles hitting it through the close pass = final trajectory of final mass x velocity vector x velocity PLUS the continued momentum impacts of every ionized particle hitting the object (directly away from the sun’s center ) since the closest approach. Complicate all of that mess with the (very small) gravitation attraction of the net comet mass back into the center of mass trying to re-accumulate the little bitty pieces.
Thus, a student (to understand the comet center, the heavy particles around it as they break off, and the very, very light charged particles surrounding the comet and each broken particle) needs to do – not ONE comet interaction – but six particles with an equal approaching velocity and velocity vector.
One large mass of 10 Kg mass,
one small mass of 1 gm,
one very small mass of 1/1000 gm,
one positive charged mass of 1/1000 gm,
one negative mass of 1/1000 gm,
and one very large mass of 10^10 gm.
Put each into the same flux of ionized gasses streaming directly away fro the sun, and apply a constant erosion factor to each proportional to the exposed surface area of the particle.
Do that, and you may see what happened during this pass by. The same laws of Newtonian physics and electro-dynamic repulsion apply to each particle, but the six results are expressed very differently at different times during each pass by of each particle.
To illustrate: A fire truck is on a steep hillside road during a forest fire. The ground above the road slips into a landslide, and the frightened firefighters swing their hose into the on-going path of debris coming down the hill at them. The dust and twigs and leaves are blown away by the fire hose momentum, and none strike the truck. The tree limbs and tree trucks are also hit by the fire hose water stream, but are moved sideways, and yet some still strike the truck shaking it back and forth. The mud and tons of rock (each individually smaller than a tree truck) are individually affected as each rock is hit, but the net of all of them cannot be stopped or diverted, and the truck is swept away downhill in a new direction and final vector.
geran says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:52 pm
You’re exactly right, your record speaks for itself.
Regurgitated stuff is somewhat odorous, don’t you think?
Perhaps consult you bill collectors for something worthwhile to say.
lsvalgaard says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:54 pm
geran says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:52 pm
You’re exactly right, your record speaks for itself.
Regurgitated stuff is somewhat odorous, don’t you think?
Perhaps consult you bill collectors for something worthwhile to say.
>>>>>>>
(I very seldom have time to get down in the mud with pigs, but tonite is an exception.)
Dr. S., you are correct again. Your stuff is somewhat odorous. Maybe you should take your own advice and offer only “worthwhile comments”. (Boy, would we like to see that.)
Or, keep it up until your bedtime, I will be here….
Everybody. No exceptions. Cut the pigs, mud, and insults. Now. Mod]
Everybody. No exceptions. Cut the pigs, mud, and insults. Now. Mod
>>>>>
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
We should remember our general relativity here. However fast the comet is travelling, from the comet’s perspective gravity will work the same as if the comet is stationary. And everything else moving – the universal and inescapable equivalence principle.
Its more likely that its the solar wind that did what both sun and wind failed to do in the Aesop’s fable – blew off the old man’s coat.
geran says:
November 30, 2013 at 2:08 pm
Everybody. No exceptions. Cut the pigs, mud, and insults. Now. Mod]
I agree, those lame, low-grade, ineffectual, and un-imaginative insults are not worth exchanging.
RACookPE1978 says:
November 30, 2013 at 1:53 pm
But, isn’t the full case different , at different times of the comet’s lifetime, at different distances from the sun?
It is, but in the inner solar system where we are, the tail disconnects are not caused by mechanical forces, but rather by magnetic forces when the field changes polarity.
lsvalgaard says:
November 30, 2013 at 6:02 pm
I agree, those lame, low-grade, ineffectual, and un-imaginative insults are not worth exchanging.
>>>>>
If we ALL can live by this then we have made huge progress here Dr. S.
geran says:
November 30, 2013 at 6:19 pm
“I agree, those lame, low-grade, ineffectual, and un-imaginative insults are not worth exchanging.”
If we ALL can live by this then we have made huge progress here Dr. S.
You should try it too, it will do you good.
John Day says:
“Newtonian physics got 12 astronauts to the Moon and back safely, so you really shouldn’t worry much about the anomaly in the precessing rate of Mercury’s perihelion which you said is fixed by relativity. The total error rate in that anomaly amounts to 43 arc-seconds per century. Big whoop. This anomaly is barely measurable in the other planets. Mercury has the “largest” only because it’s moving faster than the others.”
It is also in a deeper gravity well and relativity is a more accurate approximation than Newtonian physics in all cases, even if only slightly, so why not think in those terms until a better approximation comes along, if there is one? You can think in whatever terms you like, please alow me to use the most accurate if I so wish.
@jim G
>You can think in whatever terms you like, please alow me to use the most accurate if I so wish.
You don’t need my permission. Go in peace.
😐
lsvalgaard says:
November 29, 2013 at 9:11 am
meemoe_uk says:
November 29, 2013 at 8:55 am
This common charge separation phenomena seen on Earth is even more present in space
The difference between the Earth and Space is that the air is not a conductor, but a space plasma is. In a plasma the conductivity is so high that any charge imbalance immediately shorts out, so there are no separated charges in Space.
This is highly ironic. It used to be taught that space was a perfect vacuum in which no current couild ever flow. Now that it is inarguable that this ideal vacuum / perfect insulator concept is bunk, the model has been fliflopped to the notion that space (plasma) is such a perfect conductor that no current could ever flow for any length of time.
But there are visible astronomical phenomena that span many lightyears of space and time and resemble nothing better than they do current flows …
I dont pretend to know all the answers, but I think you’ve been taught some wrong uns.
@Scuzza Man
> the model has been fliflopped to the notion that space (plasma) is
> such a perfect conductor that no current could ever flow for any length of time.
“space” and “plasma” are not the same. Plasma is a collection of charged particles (ions), mostly electrons and protons, which are oppositely charged, and thus tend to pull themselves towards each other. When this happens the net charge goes to zero.
A current is a flow of net charge. I think what Leif means by ‘shorted out’ is that if the net charge of the plasma is zero, then the current is zero.
@me
>and thus tend to pull themselves towards each other.
>When this happens the net charge goes to zero.
… and while the ions are pulling together, a flow of non-zero net charge (“current”) does occur. Leif’s point is that the solar plasma tends to end up with zero net charge relatively quickly, which is equivalent to saying it is an excellent conductor of electric charge.
” “space” and “plasma” are not the same. Plasma is a collection of charged particles (ions), mostly electrons and protons, which are oppositely charged, and thus tend to pull themselves towards each other. When this happens the net charge goes to zero.”
I know. I was using his own term.
Nonetheless, the electromagnetic character of significant astronomical structures persists … is all I’m saying. I dont buy that “relatively quickly” line because these structures appear to be not only very large but very old …