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A comet's spin rate found to be unrelated to it's ejection of material

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posted on Sep, 19 2013 @ 03:54 PM
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www.astronomy.com...

Another issue with the conventional model that a comet is a dirty snowball.

According to the conventional model, gas sublimation jets are streaming out of the surface for the nucleus. Guess what? That seems to have no correlation with the state/rate of rotation. Hmm.

I believe this is another win for the electric comet model. We could see an entire re-write of the dirty snowball model by the end of 2014. Sacred cows make the best hamburgers!



posted on Sep, 19 2013 @ 04:01 PM
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Astronomers still so often cling to the snowball theory even when their own experiments and impactor tests show that its likely completely wrong. The electric model works much better with the evidence, but like you said, its considered blasphemy because a lot of people who thought they knew everything would be sooo butt-hurt. Awe



posted on Sep, 19 2013 @ 04:39 PM
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InverseLookingGlass
According to the conventional model, gas sublimation jets are streaming out of the surface for the nucleus. Guess what? That seems to have no correlation with the state/rate of rotation. Hmm.

That is simply not what the article says.

You get more change if there is more solar energy and less change if it is spinning more rapidly to begin with or if it is a larger comet. Larger, rapidly rotating comets are not going to change their spin status very much.

Not only does the change to the spin state of the comet depend on things like solar energy which drive the outgassing, but faster rotating comets and larger comets experience less change. That's to be expected given the basic physics involved; conservation of angular momentum. Larger angular momentum is going to be harder for the outgassing jets to influence. And once again, this is in stark contrast to the "electric comet" claims. The only thing that didn't correlate was the fraction of the surface that was active.

We expected that the fraction of the surface of the comet that is active would also be a controlling factor, but that proved not to be the case.

That does NOT say that the sublimation has no correlation with the spin state, they already said it DOES and has a larger impact on smaller comets and slower rotating comets. It says that the fraction of the surface that is active doesn't correlate. That could mean that for comets where less of the surface is active, there is a higher rate of outgassing from the jets that are exposed, thus the overall force being exerted on the comet's rotation is the same.



posted on Sep, 19 2013 @ 04:55 PM
link   

InverseLookingGlass
www.astronomy.com...

Another issue with the conventional model that a comet is a dirty snowball.

According to the conventional model, gas sublimation jets are streaming out of the surface for the nucleus. Guess what? That seems to have no correlation with the state/rate of rotation. Hmm.

I believe this is another win for the electric comet model. We could see an entire re-write of the dirty snowball model by the end of 2014. Sacred cows make the best hamburgers!


If I remember correctly they have to be Dirty Snowballs instead of Snowy Dirtballs because they would not be able to account for all the H2O in the solar system under the current model.



posted on Sep, 19 2013 @ 06:16 PM
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reply to post by ngchunter
 


I'll take my beating... I probably deserve it for the hasty headline.

I still think this result weakens the snowball model. Why?

The paper does draw a strong correlation between energy absorption from the sun and spin rate. The snow ball model predicts a strong correlation between the energy absorbed and the sublimation rate (I assert by extension the total involved surface).

By my somewhat loose logic the energy absorbed, total sublimation force, and rotation rate should all be directly correlated. To find that the apparent surface involvement of the jets (and thus sublimation rates) de-correlate with spin was a surprise and clearly violated the a priori model of the researcher.

The story isn't over. This science experiment is happening in the next few months. The current model predicts a fairly steady increase in spin rate through perihelion. We''l see in December if that actually happens. If I've gone to mush somewhere you can point that out at your leisure.



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