Comet Elenin is coming!

reply to post by Itop1


I am answering here as the Yellowstone thread is not the place for this.

Sorry but where are you getting your information from that Elenin is small? The only information on the size of Elenin is from conspiracy websites like this one and blogs, people guessing, nothing official has come out of NASA, infact, if you try to ask them or submit a question to their ask an expert, they right out blank you and refuse to answer.

Nobody knows officialy how big Elenin is so please stop spreading false rumours, this goes to every arm chair expert aswell, unless you have a link leading a reputable source ofcourse, this doesn't include MSM, Blogs or Conspiracy websites, i mean a genuine source from NASA or similar.

Please dont take this personal, i can see from your posts you have a lot of knowledge in this area but the fact is nobody really knows how big it is, and im quite fed up with people comming out throwing false rumours around.

Well I am going to take it 'personal' as I have never stated that Elenin is small only that it is estimated to be 3 to 4 km across, and that is information direct from Leonid Elenin back to an ATS member on this thread by email I understand. (That could do with some confirmation by the member if possible)

I would suggest that you look back through a page or two of this thread where the size of Elenin is discussed. You don't have to go far back.

I would also suggest that you have no business accusing me or anyone else of offering false rumours, especially when the inference of a rumour is that it is incorrect information, or information that should not be public knowledge. Now if you said Elenin was 5000km across that would be a rumour, but since comets are usually 1 to 50km across them it is hardly rumour mongering to say that it is probably 4km across.

I don't think I need you to tell me who Mr Elenin is or how Wikipedia works by the way since I do edit pages in it.

It seems that you 'quote' who is Leonid Elenin yet fail to provide a link to that information, yet you have the temerity to demand links? In fact it appears your quote came from the IASC link below yet you did not bother to follow it through to see where he is in the scheme of things. You read amateur astronomer and stopped there.

Yes he is an 'amateur' astronomer apparently, but he is not exactly small fry. This is the set up that he uses.

Amateur astronomer (and comet discoverer) Leonid Elenin lives near Moscow and is an accomplished optician who likes to observe asteroids and variable stars.

Tenagra Observatories

Source

And this, and if you want a look at a Wiki with pretty much all the information in one spot including a link to an interview with him, try this

Or this, International Astronomical Search Collaboration, Staff & Contributors

Or indeed his profile on Linked-in

All his released information is just estimations.

And if NASA released information about the size of Elenin it would also be an estimation so you might like to consider that before you start flaming people.

I would also add that in the true tradition of ATS you would be far more likely to get the truth from Leonid Elenin than from NASA. NASA - the reputable source

reply to post by PuterMan

small ore big.....density is moore important..........!
is it ice rock ore metal............

reply to post by ressiv


Indeed density is but this comet sure is not a neutron star!!!

Rock not ice

What is the likely situation with reagrds to eath passing through the tail of elenin?

Is the tail going to be longer than 1 million km?

And

What would the debris trail actually contain?

This is one of the better discussions about Elenin I have seen on the net. Take a look if you haven't already viewed it. Direct Impact with Earth is not the main concern but rather the interstellar charge it may bring from it's long orbital period ..over 3million years, estimated. These guys are mentioning a Chicago Fire or Tunguska event as possible scenarios. And a possible disruption to electrical systems and power grids. There is a lot of speculation as to what may exactly happen on this forum. It's a good read:

www.thunderbolts.info...

Hello All!

Newer member here, but like many others I have been reading the forums here at ATS for quite a while. I have a question.

I watched a program on television today that discussed our solar system and comets. The scientists in this program were adamant that comets are invisible to us until they are near Jupiter and our Sun makes them react with the release of gases and such as well as speeding them up to 70,000 to 100,000 miles an hour.

If this is the case how did we find Comet Elenin before it even hit the Ort Cloud?

Originally posted by SolidPhantom
Hello All!

Newer member here, but like many others I have been reading the forums here at ATS for quite a while. I have a question.

I watched a program on television today that discussed our solar system and comets. The scientists in this program were adamant that comets are invisible to us until they are near Jupiter and our Sun makes them react with the release of gases and such as well as speeding them up to 70,000 to 100,000 miles an hour.

If this is the case how did we find Comet Elenin before it even hit the Ort Cloud?

According to all the info that has been printed this object was first observed December 10th of 2010, and it was well within the orbit of jupiter. The Oort cloud as beleived to begin at about 2-5k AU our form the sun well beyond jupiters orbit.

The Oort cloud is thought to occupy a vast space from somewhere between 2,000 and 5,000 AU (0.03 and 0.08 ly)[9] to as far as 50,000 AU (0.79 ly)[1] from the Sun

Ill admit i have nto yet been able to read this entire thread ( im only up to page 27) so if i missed something please forgive me, i read slowly and have little time to do it.

reply to post by RainbowSerpent



Cheers for that...

I am very interested in the relation from UE perspective for this comet and this link helps a lot and shows that i am not crazy....

cool

reply to post by RadicalRebel


Thank you for the fast reply, RR! I've been doing a little research since I asked my question here and will also look into the link(s) you provided.

With all the interest in this comet my knowledge of astronomy should grow quite a bit(at least about comets and such).

Elenin's orbital elements have once again been updated at the JPL Small-Body Database:

Closest approach to Earth: 2011-Oct-16 19:51, +/- 5 minutes
Minimum distance at closest approach to Earth: 34,962,792.1 km
Closest approach to the Sun: 2011-Sep-10 17:13, +/- 3 minutes

For reference, here are the previous updates:

As of March 25th:
Closest approach to Earth: 2011-Oct-16 19:55, +/- 10 minutes
Minimum distance at closest approach to Earth: 34,934,372.5 km
Closest approach to the Sun: 2011-Sep-10 17:13, +/- 7 minutes

As of Marth 15th:
Closest approach to Earth: 2011-Oct-16 19:52, +/- 19 minutes
Minimum distance at closest approach to Earth: 34,898,790.4 km
Closest approach to the Sun: 2011-Sep-10 17:11, +/- 13 minutes

As of March 10th:
Closest approach to Earth: 2011-Oct-16 20:20, +/- 26 minutes
Minimum distance at closest approach to Earth: 34,827,592.2 km
Closest approach to the Sun: 2011-Sep-10 17:28, +/- 18 minutes

As of March 3rd:
Closest approach to Earth: 2011-Oct-16 21:08, +/- 39 minutes
Minimum distance at closest approach to Earth: 34,699,527.9 km
Closest approach to the Sun: 2011-Sep-10 17:55, +/- 26 minutes

As of February 23rd:
Closest approach to Earth: 2011-Oct-16 21:39, +/- 1 hour and 7 minutes
Minimum distance at closest approach to Earth: 34,833,620 km

reply to post by nataylor


Thank you.
Can you also give me its current coordinates to see on Google Earth?

mclinking

This is certainly getting more interesting as time passes.

An update today by a 'LeonidOS', which I believe to be Leonid Elenin on the Russian site spaceobs.org

Comet Elenin continues to increase in size, and another close approach with a large Main belt asteroid PostDate April 10th, 2011 | PostAuthor: LeonidOS (Нет рейтинга / No Ratings Yet) ISON-NM observatory / L. Elenin

April 8th at our observatory we carried out planned observations of Comet C/2010 X1. An analysis of the results of the observations shows a rapid growth of the coma. Besides the internal compact gas envelope, the forming rarified external coma is also visible in the image. It’s diameter exceeds 1 minute of arc, or 80,000 km! It is possible that such a rapid growth of the coma is associated with the apparent superposition over it of the comet’s dust tail, which after opposition, still remains invisible to the Earthly observer. The brightness of the comet also has crossed the 16m boundary, and according to the calculations of Artem Novichonok, has reached 15.4m. Such an estimate is supported by the first visual observations of the comet by Jakub Koukal and Juan Jose Gonzalez on the 4th and 5th of April respectively. It is worth noting that another well-known visual comet observer, Alan Hale, 1995 co-discoverer of comet Hale-Bopp, was not able to find Comet Elenin on April 5th with his 41-cm reflector… In the image at left still another event is captured – the close approach of Comet Elenin to asteroid 4336 Jasniewicz. Here the closeness of the objects, which are only 11 arc minutes apart, is not an optical illusion but a real physical closeness of two celestial bodies. At the time the image was obtained, the distance between the comet and the 6-km asteroid was just 1,495,000 km (0.01 AU), which is only 3.9 times the average distance between the Earth and Moon (LD). Closest approach of the two objects was several hours earlier; they were only 1,120,000 km apart (0.008 AU).

One of the (many) interesting parts of this release is the fact that it has been confirmed that we have yet to see the comets tail, so visual estimates on the size of Elenin are not related to the tail. What I dont know, but am sure someone on ATS can help, is the range of coma WIDTHS that we could expect. IS 80,000 km normal?

Here's the image mentioned in the text:

I just came across this page, seems kosher but cant say for sure has some information that was just updated today.

Elenin aim points

I am going to be trying an astronomy site i found to try and get some new pics, will definitely post if i have any luck.
If any one here has a telescope and can get a good view try and takes pics...pleeeease

reply to post by PuterMan


Information,
from Ask an Astrobiologist.
About Elenin,

astrobiology.nasa.gov...

Originally posted by UKTruth
What I dont know, but am sure someone on ATS can help, is the range of coma WIDTHS that we could expect. IS 80,000 km normal?

That's normal for a small comet. Comet Hale-Bopp, by comparison, had a coma approximately the size of the sun.

Originally posted by mclinking
reply to post by nataylor

 

Thank you.
Can you also give me its current coordinates to see on Google Earth?

mclinking

Google sky is not a live view of the sky, or even close to live. It's comprised of pre-existing sky surveys that are usually decades old.

Originally posted by ngchunter

Originally posted by UKTruth
What I dont know, but am sure someone on ATS can help, is the range of coma WIDTHS that we could expect. IS 80,000 km normal?

That's normal for a small comet. Comet Hale-Bopp, by comparison, had a coma approximately the size of the sun.

So normal then. I was a little surprised by the exclamation mark in the article - which seemed to indicate that it was unusual.

Also from spaceobs.org

Comet Elenin has passed through the Main Asteroid Belt, now it lies in the rarified part near the outside edge. In connection with the fact that the comet’s orbit is unique in that it has a small inclination for a long-period comet (a second example is comet C/2007 N3 (Lulin) the decision was made to calculate close encounters of the comet in the main asteroid belt. The search for encounters in the interval from February 18 to June 18, 2011 was made with the help of the programming complex ArtemisSIMULATOR. Refinement of the encounter distance was made with the EPOS program. As a result, 4 encounters were found: - February 28 with the asteroid 1999 TV67 at a distance of 1 774 707 km (0.012 a.u.); - April 7 with the asteroid 4336 Jasniewicz, at a distance of 1 119 713 км (0.008 а.u.); - April 19 with asteroid 2009 TJ9, at a distance of 325 428 км (0.002 а.u.); - May 20 with asteroid 1999 RQ176, at a distance of 338 403 км (0.002 а.u.) Of special interest are the last two encounters; the asteroids pass through the rather dense dust tail of the comet. It might be possible to photograph such encounters with the help of large telescopes. Unfortunately, it is not possible to show the influence of the gravitational perturbation of the comet on the asteroid with the help of earth-based observations.

Note the last sentence - which suggests that gravitational peturbations of Elenin are possible from close encounters with asteroids.

Originally posted by UKTruth
Note the last sentence - which suggests that gravitational peturbations of Elenin are possible from close encounters with asteroids.

Technically everything in the universe perturbs everything else. Gravity never ends. The amount of perturbation that some super distant galaxy has on our planet though no doubt amounts to less than planck length distances though. Whatever "perturbtive" effect Elenin has on an asteroid, or vice versa, amounts to less distance than we can measure with our telescopes. It would take a very large perturbation, one we could easily measure, to put Elenin onto a collision course with earth.

Originally posted by guessing
What is the likely situation with reagrds to eath passing through the tail of elenin?

Is the tail going to be longer than 1 million km?

And

What would the debris trail actually contain?

We know what the dust trails (as they are known) of comets contain, as we are constantly passing through them. Each time a comet crosses (or comes close to crossing) earth's orbit we get a meteor shower, and there are many showers each year. There are 17 major meteor showers and many more minor meteor showers every year.

Mostly its dust-sized meteoroids. A meteoroid the size of a grain of sand will be visible as a meteor (shooting star) in the sky, and these will usually make up the majority of meteors seen in a meteor shower, although there are often at least some larger meteoroids that create much brighter meteors (and fireballs) when they enter the atmosphere.

There is nothing to worry about, as I explained in this post - we have seen meteor storms in very recent history on occasions when we have passed through very dense (relatively speaking) dust trails made by comets, without having suffered any damage.

The tail itself is not the same thing as a dust trail - a tail is all the light stuff (gas and fine dust) that is blown away from the "dust trail" and quickly dispersed by the solar wind. The dust trail is what is left behind - ie larger meteoroids that would be large enough to create visible meteors although some dust trails may not have all of the lighter stuff blown away from them.

In the case of Elenin, it will not be close enough to earth for us to see any debris from it this year, although we could see meteors from it in years to come. There is a large community of amateur and professional meteor observers/researchers who would be very interested in observing a new meteor shower (myself included), and every comet that comes close to earth is quickly scrutinized for any potential to cause a meteor shower.

I usually search for new possible meteor showers from newly
discovered comets, I saw too this one but I think that until the
comet has a eccentricity of more of 1 there isn't a meteor shower
(in this special case it can to be two meteor showers, one in the night
and one in the day) the better new it's that IHMO the comet can
to be periodic with a period in resonance with one of the esternal
planets (it's only a possibility), if it's true then it's possible that
there
is a meteor shower linked with P/2010 X1 (I wrote P/, but now it's C/)
in this case we shall see the meteors in the next years.
But at today it's only a hope.
Best greetings.
Roberto Gorelli

METEOROBS (The meteor observing list)

Since that was written, and the orbital elements have been updated, the comet is passing us by at a greater distance than the less accurate initial orbital elements suggested, so there is even less chance of earth encountering any debris from comet Elenin in the future.