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An interesting entry in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
_scientists_ discussing (I think) this article in New Scientist on the composition of Comet Tempel 1. Or this one - may be to a paper article covering them all. Interesting articles in their own right, anyway.
Gets rather fruitloopy wrt the "Exploding Planet Hypothesis" and the "Electric Universe Theory" (no, I didn't bother to check out the listed websites for those), but the reports themselves, of clays (? what sort), carbonates and crystalline silicates are more interesting, especially in the context of the seminar I went to yesterday.
The seminar was on T Tauri stars - the baby ones which haven't even started burning hydrogen like the sun yet, their x-ray emission and a study of their "sun"spot and "solar" flare activity, and their infra-red signature from the protoplanetary disks surrounding them. The latter is the cool bit, cause you can get an idea of the disk composition from this. Guess what, you can make a model of the observed spectrum, which matches amazingly well given what you don't know, by taking the measured composition of a comet like Hale Bopp ( the one that crashed into Jupiter I think) or Comet Tempel 1, and adjusting for temperature differences (comets are not the same temperature as disks which have a wide temperature distribution depending where on the disk you are). Apparently more details are to come and the fuller results are to turn up in "Nature" at some point, but it is very cool and encouraging that the sort of stuff that is floating around our solar system as remnants of the building blocks, is also out there around other star systems, starting to make other planetary systems. Yay for olivenes and other silicates (the geologists out there may or may not wish to correct me on that one:)
And there are reasonable bets that at least some of this sort of more chemically complex dust is formed around the older (mid-life nuclear crisis) stars that I study.
And so I should get back to examining their (observable) composition.
But just think of the entire cycle of processing as thermonuclear waste getting put to good use:)
_scientists_ discussing (I think) this article in New Scientist on the composition of Comet Tempel 1. Or this one - may be to a paper article covering them all. Interesting articles in their own right, anyway.Gets rather fruitloopy wrt the "Exploding Planet Hypothesis" and the "Electric Universe Theory" (no, I didn't bother to check out the listed websites for those), but the reports themselves, of clays (? what sort), carbonates and crystalline silicates are more interesting, especially in the context of the seminar I went to yesterday.
The seminar was on T Tauri stars - the baby ones which haven't even started burning hydrogen like the sun yet, their x-ray emission and a study of their "sun"spot and "solar" flare activity, and their infra-red signature from the protoplanetary disks surrounding them. The latter is the cool bit, cause you can get an idea of the disk composition from this. Guess what, you can make a model of the observed spectrum, which matches amazingly well given what you don't know, by taking the measured composition of a comet like Hale Bopp ( the one that crashed into Jupiter I think) or Comet Tempel 1, and adjusting for temperature differences (comets are not the same temperature as disks which have a wide temperature distribution depending where on the disk you are). Apparently more details are to come and the fuller results are to turn up in "Nature" at some point, but it is very cool and encouraging that the sort of stuff that is floating around our solar system as remnants of the building blocks, is also out there around other star systems, starting to make other planetary systems. Yay for olivenes and other silicates (the geologists out there may or may not wish to correct me on that one:)
And there are reasonable bets that at least some of this sort of more chemically complex dust is formed around the older (mid-life nuclear crisis) stars that I study.
And so I should get back to examining their (observable) composition.
But just think of the entire cycle of processing as thermonuclear waste getting put to good use:)
