Starship Asterisk*

bystander wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Did a Comet Hit Cause an Explosion on the Sun?
Universe Today | Nancy Atkinson | 2011 Oct 03
http://asterisk.apod.com/viewtopic.php?t=25467

The comet and the Coronal Mass Ejection
Discover Blogs | Bad Astronomy | 2011 Oct 04
Good video analysis by Phil Plait

Big comet, big CME... big coincidence?
Sungrazing Comets | Karl Battams | 2011 Oct 04
Analysis by Sungrazer researcher

http://tetherballs.net/ wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

<<Tether Ball Rules: A player can commit a violation by stepping onto his opponent’s half of the pole, by catching and throwing the ball (a “crossy”), by striking the rope instead of the ball (a “ropey”), by hitting the ball twice before it has either circled the pole or been returned by the opponent or, in some variants, struck the pole (a “double touchie”). Generally, after a violation occurs, the game pauses and the ball is returned to the position it was in before the violation; the number of wraps around the pole is re-created (or a penalty-wrap is awarded to the player who did not commit the foul). The player who did not commit the violation then serves the ball. If, however, the violation appears to be intentional, it may result in loss of game.

Tetherball has long been a favorite of school yards, campers, and those who enjoy spending time in parks. While the goal of the game is simple- to wrap the string of the tetherball around the pole it is tethered to by knocking it back and forth- the thrill of competition makes it far more complex. The movie “Napolean Dynamite” attracted new players as well, after watching the title character play the game in the movie. The history of tetherball is somewhat unclear- it’s not an “official” sport with a governing body or committee, which means that any history of the sport is little more than an urban legend. One favorite rendition says that in the ninth century, the Tartars would attach the severed head of a defeated opponent to a rope, tie it to a pole, and then knock it back and forth just for fun. The pole used in the gruesome sport was called a barber pole, a reference to the barbarian nature of the Tartars. Perhaps a more likely explanation refers to the tradition of dancing around a maypole. Long ago, residents of small farming villages would gather around a tree or pole and dance around it while holding ribbons or garlands. The setup of a modern tetherball and tetherball court makes this seem a more likely origin for the game, and one description of the game calls it a “cross between volleyball and a maypole dance.” Maybe the most believable history of the game is simply that tetherball was invented after volleyball in the late 1800s. Early tetherballs were simply volleyballs attached to a rope, and the game likely evolved from volleyball. No matter where tetherball originated, the popularity of the sport is hard to ignore. In 2007, the tetherball tournament held in San Diego attracted more than 80 players.>>

michaelpat wrote:My APOD has been hijacked this week by spamers. Today's picture is of an animal with its head caught in a fence, yesterdays was of a French (a Paris train station) train wreck and the day before was a shot of a forest of fallen trees.

Anybody else getting these spam images?

What gives?

owlice wrote:michaelpat, you are probably using the APOD backgrounder program, which was written before videos became so common on the Web. This program doesn't handle videos, and when something other than an image is the day's APOD, the backgrounder program looks for the first available image amongst the links. See here for more information.

The shot of the fallen trees WAS the APOD for that day. You might want to look at APOD on the web on occasion, as that is the medium for which the site is designed. It's great to have the other options, but sometimes they just don't work as well as the original.

Psnarf wrote:
Whatever it was, comet or asteroid, it had to have vaporized high above the surface. I'll go out on a limb here, I think it is impossible for the object to have caused the CME. My feeble grasp of plasma physics leads me to doubt that comets or even asteroids can last very long in a two-million-degree Kelvin environment. If the object did strike the surface causing the CME, it's gotta be space monkeys. No wonder they're so difficult to find, they're hiding just below the surface of the sun.

neufer wrote:

[url=http://www-ssc.igpp.ucla.edu/personnel/russell/papers/896/][size=150]Mechanism[/size][/url] [size=150]for generating a detached ICME flux rope through [b][u]reconnection[/u][/b] of coronal magnetic fields.[/size]

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Psnarf wrote:
Whatever it was, comet or asteroid, it had to have vaporized high above the surface. I'll go out on a limb here, I think it is impossible for the object to have caused the CME. My feeble grasp of plasma physics leads me to doubt that comets or even asteroids can last very long in a two-million-degree Kelvin environment. If the object did strike the surface causing the CME, it's gotta be space monkeys. No wonder they're so difficult to find, they're hiding just below the surface of the sun.

I too doubt striking the surface would have any effect.

However, if the comet were to explode into a high density plasma at some very critical place in the coronasphere it might just trigger the reconnection of coronal magnetic lines leading to a CME.