NASA Photos Show Outburst from Potential 'Comet of the Century'

[Buster's Uncle]

NASA Photos Show Outburst from Potential 'Comet of the Century'
SPACE.com
Mike Wall 1 hour ago

These images from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of Comet ISON were taken on June 13, 2013, when ISON was 312 million miles from the sun.

A comet that could put on a dazzling show when it zooms through the inner solar system later this year is already blasting out huge amounts of gas and dust, new observations by a NASA spacecraft show.

Images taken on June 13 by NASA's infrared Spitzer Space Telescope reveal that dust and carbon dioxide gas are streaming off Comet ISON, forming a tail about 186,400 miles (300,000 kilometers) long, researchers said.

"We estimate ISON is emitting about 2.2 million pounds (1 million kilograms) of what is most likely carbon dioxide gas and about 120 million pounds (54.4 million kg) of dust every day," Carey Lisse, leader of NASA's Comet ISON Observation Campaign and a senior research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., said in a statement.

"Previous observations made by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope and the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission and Deep Impact spacecraft gave us only upper limits for any gas emission from ISON," Lisse added. "Thanks to Spitzer, we now know for sure the comet's distant activity has been powered by gas."

Comet ISON was 312 million miles (502 million km) from the sun — 3.35 times farther than the Earth-sun distance — when Spitzer made the new observations, NASA officials said.

The comet, which is about 3 miles (5 km) wide, is cruising toward a close encounter with the sun on Nov. 28, when it will skim just 724,000 miles (1.16 million km) above the solar surface. ISON could blaze up dramatically around this time, perhaps shining as brightly as the full moon in the sky, researchers say.

But there's no guarantee that ISON will live up to the hype. For example, it could break apart as it approaches the sun, fizzling out as some other "comet of the century" candidates have done over the years.

While it's tough to predict the behavior of any comet, forecasting ISON's sky show is particularly difficult. Scientists think ISON is making its first-ever trip to the inner solar system from the distant and frigid Oort Cloud, a huge repository of comets that lies between roughly 600 billion and 6 trillion miles (965 billion and 9.65 trillion km) from the sun.

Comet ISON is becoming more active as it warms up during this epic journey. Researchers expect to get an increasingly detailed look at ISON's composition over time, because different materials boil off at different distances from the sun.

"Much of the carbon in the comet appears to be locked up in carbon dioxide ice," Lisse said. "We will know even more in late July and August, when the comet begins to warm up near the water-ice line outside of the orbit of Mars, and we can detect the most abundant frozen gas, which is water, as it boils away from the comet."

ISON's solar flyby promises to be more than just a skywatching spectacle. Comets are primordial bodies composed of water, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide and other materials — the same fundamental building blocks that gave rise to the planets 4.5 billion years ago.

"ISON is very exciting," Jim Green, NASA's director of planetary science in Washington, D.C., said in a statement. "We believe that data collected from this comet can help explain how and when the solar system first formed."

The comet was discovered last September by amateur astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok. It takes its name from the equipment the duo used — the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON) near Kislovodsk, Russia.

http://news.yahoo.com/nasa-photos-show-outburst-potential-comet-century-211440317.html

[Geo]

Four months. Four more months, before I might see a better show in the sky then Hale-Bopp. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Might.

I've been burned too many times to get my hopes up.

[Geo]

Btw, you are either a quick-reader, or post a bunch of read articles in one go. I mean, three to eight minutes between new threads? 

[Buster's Uncle]

Is it really that quick?  It feels like it takes forever when a story has a few pics.  I am a fast reader, though.

[Buster's Uncle]

Comet ISON Blazes with Distant Galaxies in Stunning Hubble Photo
SPACE.com
Mike Wall 5 hours ago
 

The sun-approaching Comet ISON floats against a seemingly infinite backdrop of numerous galaxies and a handful of foreground stars

 
A spectacular new photo gives a deep-space view of Comet ISON, which could put on a dazzling show when it zooms through the inner solar system in late November.

The image — which researchers stitched together from five photos of ISON taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope on April 30 — shows the icy wanderer blazing against a backdrop of galaxies and bright stars.

"The result is part science, part art," Josh Sokol of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Md., which operates Hubble, wrote in a blog post last week. "It's a simulation of what our eyes, with their ability to dynamically adjust to brighter and fainter objects, would see if we could look up at the heavens with the resolution of Hubble."

All five images were captured by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 UVIS instrument, researchers said. Three exposures were made with a filter that transmits yellow and green light (represented as blue in the image), while two used a filter that lets in red and some near-infrared light.

"In general, redder things are older, more evolved, than blue things — this is true both for the crosshair-spiked stars and the smudges of distant galaxies," Sokol wrote.

Comet ISON is cruising toward a close encounter with the sun on Nov. 28, when it will skim just 724,000 miles (1.16 million kilometers) above the solar surface. The comet could get incredibly luminous around this time, perhaps shining as brightly as the full moon, researchers say.

ISON has thus attracted a fair bit of "comet of the century" hype, with skywatchers and scientists around the world eagerly tracking its long trek toward the sun. Indeed, Hubble is just one of many instruments that researchers around the world are training on the comet as part of a coordinated observation campaign.

Comets are primordial bodies made from the same fundamental building blocks that coalesced to form the planets 4.5 billion years ago. So scientists hope that close study of the material that boils off ISON as it nears the sun will reveal insights about the solar system's early days.

While hopes for a great sky show are high, there is no guarantee that ISON will live up to the hype. Comets are notoriously unpredictable, and ISON's behavior could be particularly tricky to forecast. The comet, which was discovered in September 2012, is thought to be making its first-ever foray into the inner solar system from the distant and frigid Oort Cloud.

http://news.yahoo.com/comet-ison-blazes-distant-galaxies-stunning-hubble-photo-113938594.html