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Rumors of Comet ISON ‘Fizzling’ May be Greatly Exaggerated
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope provides a close-up look of Comet ISON (C/2012 S1), as photographed on April 10, when the comet was slightly closer than Jupiter’s orbit at a distance of 386 million miles from the sun. Credit:NASA, ESA, J.-Y. Li (Planetary Science Institute), and the Hubble Comet ISON Imaging Science Team.
A press release out yesterday about a recent paper on Comet ISON has caused a mild uproar across the astronomy-minded social media outlets and some websites. The article issued from the Physics & Astrophysics Computation Group (FACOM) at the University of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia is titled “Comet Of The Century? Not Yet! Comet C/2012 S1 ISON Has Fizzled Completely And May Disintegrate At Or Before Reaching Perihelion.”
The article had professional astronomers and comet enthusiasts alike shaking their heads in disbelief.
For one, any current determination of ISON’s ultimate fate when it gets close to the Sun later this year is speculation at best, (as is the case with almost any other sun-grazing comet) and since no one on planet Earth has seen ISON since it entered the Sun’s glare in June, there is absolutely no way to determine the comet’s current state, either. The almost unanimous shout from the astronomy internets was “Please! We just have to wait and see what happens with ISON.”
But the press release also had this journalist (and others) wondering if Ferrin’s views were taken out of context for the sake of a dramatic press release.
(…)
Read the rest of Rumors of Comet ISON ‘Fizzling’ May be Greatly Exaggerated (1,172 words)
© nancy for Universe Today, 2013. |
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Source: http://www.universetoday.com/103832/rumors-of-comet-ison-fizzling-may-be-greatly-exaggerated/
