Is Comet Holmes actually V'Ger?

Magwang

Comet Holmes has grown in month to be bigger than the sun, making the largest object in our solar system.




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Is it a comet? ......... or actually V'Ger aka Voyager 6?
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Magwang

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap071128.html

Why did Comet Holmes brighten? The unexpectedly bright Comet 17P/Holmes continues to grace northern skies as a naked-eye addition to the constellation Perseus. Any northern sky enthusiast with a dark sky, a bright curiosity, and a recent sky map should still be able to locate the comet in a few minutes. What is seen, however, is primarily the sun-light reflecting dust coma. It surrounds an iceberg nucleus too small and too faint to discern. Clues to the nearly million-fold brightness increase are therefore being sought in dramatic images of the enigmatic comet's central regions taken earlier this month by the Hubble Space Telescope. One such Hubble image, shown above, indicates a still unresolved dense central dust cloud near the nucleus, surrounded by a more complex, anisotropic coma. The Hubble images do not show any obvious fragmentation of the nucleus, however, as was seen last year in Comet Schwassman-Wachmann 3. Observers around and above the world will continue to study this unusual addition to the night sky.

starstuff

My aunt's boyfriend is really good at taking pictures though a telescope, and he showed me a picture of this comet he took. Really cool

What I read was that there was some sort of erruption on the comet that blew out a bunch of dust and particles outward to form that huge atmosphere. I don't think anyone really knows why--we really don't know very much about comets, since they are really hard to land a probe on. Did you realize that although the atmosphere of that comet is larger than the sun, the comet itself is only a couple miles wide? Wild :wow:

Magwang

Most comets are hail stones or snowballs. The tail points away from the solar winds. Possibly the sun's energy initiated the Holmes corona. I think its interesting that it started recently for a comet that's been around a while.

buddhafoot

Dude - you keep this up and you're going to insist that you only marry "bald chicks".

Get out a little more.

-bf