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Comet ISON on Nov. 17 with a tail nearly 8 degrees long streaming from a small, strongly condensed coma. Click to enlarge. Credit: Michael Jaeger
Wonderful photos of Comets ISON and Lovejoy with their swollen comas and developing tails have appeared on these pages, but recently, amateur and professional astronomers have probed deeper to discover fascinating dust structures emanating from their very cores. Most comets possess a fuzzy, starlike pseudo-nucleus glowing near the center of the coma. Hidden within this minute luminous cocoon of haze and gas lies the true comet nucleus, a dark, icy body that typically spans from a few to 10 kilometers wide. Comet ISON’s nucleus could be as large as several kilometers and hefty enough (we hope!) to survive its close call with the sun on Nov. 28.
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Read the rest of Comet ISON Grows Wings; Comet Lovejoy, a Fountain (817 words)
© Bob King for Universe Today, 2013. |
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Post tags: coma, Comet ISON, Comet Lovejoy, dust fountain, hood, jet, nucleus
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