Explanation: This timely, telescopic, two panel mosaic spans about 10 full moons across planet Earth's predawn skies. Recorded as the year began from Tenerife, Canary Islands, near the top of the frame are the faint coma and tail of Comet Borrelly (P/19). A comet with a seven year orbital period, Borrelly's nucleus was visited by the ion propelled spacecraft Deep Space 1 near the beginning of the 21st century. Anchoring the scene at the bottom is brilliant star Arcturus (Alpha Bootes) and Comet Catalina (C/2013 US10) a first time visitor from the Oort Cloud. Catalina's yellowish dust tail extends below and right. Buffeted by winds and storms from the Sun, the comet's complex ion tail sweeps up and toward the right, across most of the field of view. Remarkably, one of the composition's 30 second exposure subframes also caught the trail of a bright meteor, slashing toward the left between comets and bright star.
hevol wrote:Is there a third comet located in the upper middle part of the picture?
I thought so too at first, but there are really only two comets here. One of them is the faint object at top, and then there is of course comet Catalina whose green coma is right next to brilliant yellow star Arcturus at bottom left. The eye-catching "middle object", the elongated blue-green object at 9 o'clock, is a bright meteor.
Two questiones:
1.- Where does energy Catalina Comet to travel
this big distance from the Oort Cloud.?
2.- How to evade Catalina Comet the gravitational fields
of the Solar System? Thanks
saturno2 wrote:Two questiones:
1.- Where does energy Catalina Comet to travel
this big distance from the Oort Cloud.?
2.- How to evade Catalina Comet the gravitational fields
of the Solar System? Thanks
I'm not the best person to answer that, but here goes.
All objects in our solar system are in orbit around the Sun. They don't need any particular energy to orbit the Sun. They were likely all born out of the rotating protoplanetary disk that gave birth to the Sun some 4½ billion years ago. The planets, moons, asteroids and comets of the solar system were born orbiting, so to speak.
All the planets except Mercury have relatively circular orbits, and they all orbit the Sun in the same plane, the ecliptic. Pluto, the fascinating minor planet, has a very elliptical orbit that is tilted with respect to the ecliptic.
Many if not most of the small objects in the outer solar system have more elliptical orbits than the planets of the solar system. Don't ask me why that is so.
But in order to become a comet and travel deep into the inner solar system from its starting point (often in the distant Oort cloud), the comet-to-be has to be disturbed in some way, usually by interacting with another object in the Oort cloud and having its orbit changed. It is also possible that the passage of a star not far from the solar system can disturb objects in the Oort cloud and change their orbits.
When the the orbit of an Oort cloud object has been changed so that it plunges into the inner solar system and develops a tail and thus becomes a comet, it just blunders its way ahead. It surely can't swerve to avoid any planets, moons, asteroids or other objects in its path. A comet could potentially crash into the Earth and do unspeakable damage. But the chances of this happening are extremely small, certainly within our own lifetimes.
Here is a short youtube video showing an animation of the orbits of three recurring comets in the solar system.
Yes.....Catalina is DISTURBED...
She was happy in her home in the Oort Cloud. When she was bothered and disturbed and fell in with the "wrong crowd" of The Solar System, "the big boys", pulled her in deeper and deeper by their web of influences, (a sad and often repeated tale)...if she is not careful, she could end up faded, burned out, like Icarus, flying too close to the Sun. Or Crash under its influences, consumed by it....tragic....just tragic....
But she could also become a returning feature, a star in her own right...or finding it not to her liking, flee back to her home. YES, there's no place like home.
What is that faint horizontal line, extending to the right, at the bottom of the picture between the star and the comet? At first I thought that was the meteor. But the meteor is above the star and to the left, correct? Is it merely an artifact of the photographic equipment?
I am interested in understanding why Catalina's tail is so irregular and curling like blown smoke. This seems different than most cometary tails that extend away from the coma in a relatively straight line. Solar wind seems to dictate the direction and shape of comet tails, so this one appears somewhat distorted. Got any ideas?
FrankAllen wrote:I am interested in understanding why Catalina's tail is so irregular and curling like blown smoke. This seems different than most cometary tails that extend away from the coma in a relatively straight line. Solar wind seems to dictate the direction and shape of comet tails, so this one appears somewhat distorted. Got any ideas?
FrankAllen wrote:I am interested in understanding why Catalina's tail is so irregular and curling like blown smoke. This seems different than most cometary tails that extend away from the coma in a relatively straight line. Solar wind seems to dictate the direction and shape of comet tails, so this one appears somewhat distorted. Got any ideas?
Comets have two kinds of tails: dust tails, which consists of (moderately) large particles, and which are typically more or less straight, and ion tails, which are often far more turbulent.
The ion tail consists of small charged particles, which are very vulnerable to the influence of charged particles from the solar wind.
The grainy youtube video below shows the ion tail of a comet being torn off the comet, likely because it was hit by a solar storm.
Comets and Bright Star
