Could comet Holmes drastically change course?

Here's a remark that caused me concern;

The offset nature of the coma, seen in ground-based images, suggests "a large fragment broke off and subsequently disintegrated into tiny dust particles after moving away from the main nucleus.

source

If a huge chunk of the comet disintegrates, wouldn't that alter later orbits? Could it someday change course enough to endanger the earth?

Thoughts?

2PacSade-

I don't think any pieces spitting off the nucleus will be a threat to us. They will be in a new and slightly different orbit around the sun compared to Holmes, but Holmes' orbit does not come very close to our orbit.

There are plenty of NEO's (Near Earth Objects) that warrant much closer monitoring than Holmes. Small changes in these orbits are much more lightly to be a threat to us I think. There is also a very real but small chance an object with an extreme long-period orbit, on the order of hundreds or even thousands of years could catch us unawares.

Perhaps more dangerous than all of these put together is the potential threat from the Taurid meteoroid swarm, which is well known to cross our orbit (we are just crossing it now as it happens). This book is great reading on the subject IMO.

No, it will fade by next month, as it is doing now, but it's growing from it's very small initial size.

Check this simulator thread to see another one, supposedly approaching, comet Honda. Dec., THIS year a close pass (Tuttle) and then maybe a hit in 2011.

According to the simulator, Holmes is beyond, at least, Mars now and dropping fast. A "hang around" until early next year and then disappears...

Simulator:
janus.astro.umd.edu...

Comet Honda Thread:
www.abovetopsecret.com...

Hubble doesn't know why it changed course. I think from probes like Deep Impact, Cassini, Galileo, etc., we've affected flight paths of objects of this nature. Look for the "Lucifer Project" thread about a planned crash course of Cassini in May of 2008 into Saturn to try and create a sun.

They did the same thing w/ Galileo in, I think, 2003, into Jupiter, and the other spot formed. NASA is a little insane and from reading this Dark Mission book, they're pretty corrupt too.

(edit: busted link on the Hubble article, it's from today about Holmes --

The powerful Hubble telescope has been orbiting a couple of hundred miles above Earth for 17 years, and seven years ago trained its eye on Comet Holmes, nearly 150 million miles away, without seeking anything special. It inferred from the comet's brightness that its nucleus of rock and ice was barely more than 2 miles wide and that no dust obscured it.

Now the three close-in Hubble images have zeroed in on the 15,000-mile core of particles closest to the nucleus.

"We may finally be starting to detect the emergence of the nucleus itself," Weaver said.

www.sfgate.com... . . . but use their search feature as to the link/relay ain't working.)

[edit on 16-11-2007 by anhinga]

[edit on 16-11-2007 by anhinga]

i'm glad that comet Holmes is behaving unexpectedly

it tells us that the hive mind intellects in the space community
don't actually 'know-it-all', their scientific models are only likely
probabilities...even with their physics & newtonian mechanics which includes Angular Momentum......

Sure enough, the observed outgassing will definitely alter comet Holems orbit...but how much is yet to be determined


i just don't understand the hype that the comet has enlarged to a mass as big as the sun... -that's bogus hype-

the comet is still physically as small as it was when it was a speck in space
that could only be seen with a medium power telescope,
the outgassing (first explained in one of my reply posts on another thread)
& the subsequent 'cloud' of material is the explaination for the apparent
& sudden 'largeness' of the comet ----it's only a coma, folks!

any association with the Hopi red-blue kachinas....or the planet 'X'-->
is just a charlaton...preying....on the targeted persons open-mindedness
and trust




[edit on 16-11-2007 by St Udio]

reply to post by St Udio

No one has claimed that the comet's mass has increased at all. It's just that the diameter of the extremely tenuous coma now exceeds that of the sun.

I think momentum conservation is pretty darn solid as physical laws go. It's a straightforward consequence of the homogeneity of space with respect to translations. So, bits of the comet might push on each other, but the center of mass stays in pretty much the same orbit. small bits will be blown away by solar radiation pressure, pushed and pulled by the sun's gravity gradient, and diverge a bit due to perturbations by the planets, but the nucleus should stay in nearly the same orbit.

reply to post by anhinga


Thanx for the link to the simulator & other info! It really puts things a bit more in perspective. ( At least in 2D. )

2PacSade-