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General Category => Science, Technology and Knowledge => Space => Topic started by: Kamaji on February 03, 2023, 02:35:38 pm

Title: A huge ‘alien’ comet hurtled toward the sun — see what happened next
Post by: Kamaji on February 03, 2023, 02:35:38 pm
A huge ‘alien’ comet hurtled toward the sun — see what happened next

By Brooke Kato
February 2, 2023

It was star-grazing.

A giant “alien” comet had a recent near-miss with our solar system’s most notorious star: the sun.

Experts believe the comet – known formally as 96P/Machholz 1 – came from somewhere else beyond our solar system. The intergalactic “ice ball,” which measured 3.7 miles wide, was plummeting toward the sun earlier this week, and its close encounter was caught on camera by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.

Typical comets are dissolved when approaching the sun so close, but the grandeur of 96P – more than two-thirds the height of Mount Everest, according to LiveScience – kept it from completely dissipating.

“96P is one of the most compositionally and behaviorally weird comets in the solar system,” Karl Battams, the director of the US Naval Research Laboratory’s Sungrazer Project in Washington, DC, said in a tweet last month.

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Source:  https://nypost.com/2023/02/02/a-huge-alien-comet-hurtled-toward-the-sun-see-what-happened-next/
Title: Re: A huge ‘alien’ comet hurtled toward the sun — see what happened next
Post by: Weird Tolkienish Figure on February 03, 2023, 02:55:19 pm
Alien? Not really, it's from our own solar system.
Title: Re: A huge ‘alien’ comet hurtled toward the sun — see what happened next
Post by: Kamaji on February 03, 2023, 03:13:00 pm
Quote from: Weird Tolkienish Figure on February 03, 2023, 02:55:19 pm
Alien? Not really, it's from our own solar system.

Hence the quotation marks.
Title: Re: A huge ‘alien’ comet hurtled toward the sun — see what happened next
Post by: DefiantMassRINO on February 03, 2023, 03:57:39 pm
The person or AI that wrote this is stupid and lazy.

The sun is our solar system's only star.

https://www.spacereference.org/comet/96p-machholz-1 (https://www.spacereference.org/comet/96p-machholz-1)

96P/Machholz 1 orbits the sun every 1,930 days (5.28 years), coming as close as 0.12 AU and reaching as far as 5.94 AU from the sun. Its orbit is highly elliptical. 96P/Machholz 1 is about 6.4 kilometers in diameter, making it larger than 99% of asteroids, comparable in size to the San Francisco Bay.