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COMET ISON UPDATE – METEOR OUTBURST IN PROGRESS – LOVEJOY’S ACTIVE TAIL (Video)
THE GHOST OF COMET ISON - SPACEWEATHER.COM http://spaceweather.com/
According to the spacecraft’s SWAN instrument, the comet stopped producing so-called Lyman alpha photons soon after its closest approach to the sun. Karl Battams of the CIOC explains what this means: “Without getting technical, Lyman-Alpha is a consequence of sunlight interacting with hydrogen, and if we are not seeing that interaction then it means that the levels of hydrogen (and hence ice) are extremely low. This is indicative of a completely burned out nucleus, or no nucleus at all.”
“The evidence appears strong that at some point approaching perihelion – whether days or hours – Comet ISON likely began to completely fall apart,” he continues. “What remains of ISON now is going to be either just a cloud of dust, or perhaps a few very depleted chunks of nucleus. Either way, it’s not going to flare up at this point and we should assume the comet’s show is over.”
COMET ISON UPDATE – METEOR OUTBURST IN PROGRESS – LOVEJOY’S ACTIVE TAIL Watch the video here:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apA4BbTu0Bg
“However, we do need to verify this,” says Battams. “Hopefully the Hubble team can come to the rescue! In mid-December, Hubble will be pointed in the direction of where ISON should be and they’ll try and image something. If no fragments are surviving, or they are tiny, then Hubble will not be able to find anything, but that negative detection will tell us something: namely that ISON is indeed gone for good.
METEOR OUTBURST: The Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar (CMOR) is detecting an outburst of Andromedid meteors on Dec. 8th. “Meteor rates last night were near 20 per hour (ZHR),” reports Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office. “The shower could increase in intensity tonight, so we hope observers (especially Europeans) will be alert for meteors.” Andromedid meteoroids come from Comet 3D/Biela, which broke apart in the 19th century. The shower’s radiant in Andromeda is high in the sky after sunset for observers in the Northern Hemisphere. A similar outburst of Andromedids in 2011 was rich in faint meteors. If the 2013 outburst is the same, dark skies will be required to see it.
COMET LOVEJOY’S ACTIVE TAIL: Amateur astronomers around the northern hemisphere are reporting activity in the tail of naked-eye Comet Lovejoy (C/2013 R1). In Nagano, Japan, astrophotographer Kouji Ohnishi could see big changes in less than an hour of monitoring:
Michael Jäger saw the same “disconnection event” from his observatory in Masenberg, Austria, on Dec. 5th. The disturbance could be caused by a gust of solar wind or perhaps an episode of vigorous outgassing in the comet’s core.
SPACEWEATHER.COM: http://spaceweather.com/
We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon,
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden. CSN&Y