Mystery, awe, and a comet
Update: My apologies. Comet Holmes has gotten a lot more attention by the media than I thought. So ignore my rants about the media. The rest of this update on the status is - I believe - on target.
(See Hubble press release here.)
Here's an update on Comet Holmes:
1. Why did it suddenly brighten one million times? No one knows.
2. How big is it now? Bigger than our Sun which makes it the largest object in our solar system.
3. Is it's appearance and behavior unusual for a comet? You bet.
My concern of late is to find a way to show it to people - there's a public Observatory open house tomorrow night (7 pm - Nov. 17, 2007 - weather permitting) at UMass Dartmouth and I'll have scope and video camera there assuming the clouds give us a break. My little technical problem is to find a telescope that allows me to still fit the entire comet on the video screen with some space around it for perspective. But it keeps growing ;-)
Here's my latest attempt - pardon the crude image, but this is simply a snapshot of the video screen.
The image above uses a small, marginal, short-focus telescope, plus a focal reducer, to achieve a decently wide field - but the quality leaves something to be desired. Still, isn't it fascinating the way stars shine right through this comet? And it happens to be slowly moving across an incredibly rich field of background stars so that it passes over some every night.
Sky and Telescope just summed up the speculation about Holmes with this very rational theory:
Other comets have erupted like this before — Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak's performance in 1973 comes to mind — though not as dramatically. Most likely, repeated warmings by the Sun caused a dusty, ice-free "crust" to form on the nucleus, sealing the interior. Over time the pressure beneath this seal steadily grew as once-frozen ice became gas, eventually breaking through and sending large chunks of crust flying into space that quickly disintegrated into microscopic dust.
But as they explain, it's only a theory and we may never know the answer.
Even Hubble has gotten into the act. It was used to take this close-up picture earlier in the month of the nucleus. No - even the Hubble can not show the little 2-mile chunk of rock and frozen gases that is the actual comet. Afterall, the comet is 151 million miles from us. To put that in perspective, the Sun is 92 million miles away.
I've been telling visitors to Driftway Observatory this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This comet is just plain unusual in its behavior and appearance. I was glad to see that confirmed in the S&T article by professional astronomers.
This comet's behavior, particularly the perfectly spherical outer halo, has confounded even the experts. Remarkably, 17P/Holmes has mimicked almost perfectly the behavior seen during its discovery 115 years ago. "I have never in my experience as a cometary scientist seen such a symmetric structure in emitted material," admits Carey Lisse of Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory.
Colleague Harold Weaver adds, "That offset blob was very unusual. Some kind of large chunk must have come off and disintegrated." Comet theorist Zdenek Sekanina (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) estimates that this "megaburst," most likely triggered late on October 23rd (Universal Time), shot 100 million tons of dust into space. To put this in perspective, Mount St. Helens unleashed a 500-million-ton ash cloud during its catastrophic 1980 eruption.
To me the other mystery about Holmes remains: Why do the mainstream media virtually ignore it? My theory? First, it's not entertaining enough and the media has totally abandoned its news role for entertainment. Second, the media plays follow-the-leader. They are all trapped in the intense competition of a 24/7 news cycle and can only ape one another. Third, they just don't know any better and they can't make this kind of decision about a science story on their own. Of course, there's a fourth possibility: Just because I find this event awesome doesn't mean everyone should. But in an increasingly irrational world I keep hoping to see little glimmer of sanity - one indication of which would be some interest in something other than the latest escapade of OJ Simpson.
Why should we care about a comet - any comet? Because we have the capability to care. We have the bailkity to think. We have the capacity to ask questions and find answers. And because every mystery has, at its core, answers that inevitably prove helpful to us in ways we don;t anticipate.
Comments
Don D. writes:
I did a Google search of the web and got 1.2 M entrys. Of the first 50, only handful carried a MSM tag, and some of those were the web version, e.g. MSNBC.com, Chicago Tribune.com. The rest were Sky & Telescope and its ilk, observatory and governmental facilities (e.g. NASA), and individual observers. Some of the links to MSM related pages:. . . to the SF Chronicle outlet:
http://tinyurl.com/2o8nam
. . . to MSNBC
http://tinyurl.com/38tvw2
. . . to Chicago Tribune's .com entry
http://tinyurl.com/2oczje
. . . to the Boston Globe's on-line story
http://tinyurl.com/3ak67b
. . . to US News & World Report
http://tinyurl.com/2p67nq
. . . to the AP story
http://tinyurl.com/2a3yh8
. . . to Reuter's
http://tinyurl.com/2ahtal
. . . and this to the blog of a Baltimore Sun reporter on weather and science
ttp://tinyurl.com/3974mc
Is it possible that MSM enthusiasm for the story is dampened by the realization that so many people were already putting up good stories and pictures that they simply abdicated their niche to the new medium? For instance Frank, the weather/science reporter at the Baltimore Sun, has presented a piece that may not have appeared in print but that piece on his blog does carry the Sun's logo?
But that still does not cover the paper that carries the self-congratulatory sobriquet "All the news that's fit to print." ;-)
OK - I'm wrong. some of the main stream media have covered it some of the time. But do keep in mind that they've had more than three weeks to do so. I searched just Google News - and I should have done this earlier, I admit - and found about 350 entries. However, they are scattered over a three-week time period and frequently have local angles, such as pictures of the comet taken by local amateur astronomers. The AP story is agood example - it's not so much a science story as it is the story of a professor atone small college taking students up onto the roof to look at Holmes. Also, once the Hubble release came out there were more stories. But by that time the comet had already started to grow dimmer. But I'm guilty of making a judgment based largely on my own experience - I haven seen it on local wetaher - a frequent place with astronomy events get some coverage - or in the NYT - guess I'll have to start wreading some paper that doesn't carry news fit to print. :-)