2007-11-09 04:42:04 · 6 answers · asked by Amee 2 in Science & Mathematics ➔ Astronomy & Space
It's believed comets are irregularly shaped, weak snowballs traveling through space. It could be that as the sun's light fell on it, and it began to out-gas, that a piece or many pieces broke off & all began to out-gas. The larger area available for out-gassing produced the material faster than it had been, and that's what we're seeing.
2007-11-09 04:51:11 · answer #1 · answered by quantumclaustrophobe 7 · 2⤊ 1⤋
Comets do sometimes undergo this sort of sudden brightening, though seldom to the degree that Comet Holmes did. It's called an outburst. We don't know enough about the structure of the comet to say for sure how it happened. One hypothesis is that this comet has hollow spaces, and that material eroding away as the comet passed perihelion caused one of these hollows to break open, releasing a cloud of dust and gas in the process, and exposing new material to boil away into space. The comet had done something similar back in 1892 when it was first discovered.
There is no evidence that the nucleus has broken up. Some observers mistook stars shining through the coma for core fragments.
2007-11-09 13:18:14 · answer #2 · answered by injanier 7 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Comets are dirty snowballs with all the cohesiveness of well, a snowball on Earth. They are also very under-dense, which means they are riddled with voids and cavities. Comets are so weakly held together that they can completely fall apart just from the Sun's heat or passing near a planet. Comets emit their gases from fissures, cracks and vents on the surface rather than all over. This activity can cause portions of the crust to blow off or cave in. It's possible a giant sinkhole opened up on Holmes because the crust collapsed there from previous out-gassing undermining it. Or Holmes experienced an impact much like the one from the Deep Impact probe on comet Temple-1 or a partial break-up event.
2007-11-09 13:17:52 · answer #3 · answered by Anonymous · 2⤊ 0⤋
No one can say for sure at this point. It was not due to the comet getting heated by the Sun, because it's far away from the Sun and was many months past closest approach to the Sun when the outburst occurred. There will be many articles and discussions about this in the future!
2007-11-09 13:40:38 · answer #4 · answered by GeoffG 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
if its the one that was in the news this last month - it broke apart and now reflects more light back to earth even though the comet is now in smaller pieces.
2007-11-09 12:52:02 · answer #5 · answered by william w 2 · 1⤊ 1⤋
So we could see it better:D
2007-11-09 13:11:40 · answer #6 · answered by Yahoo! 5 · 0⤊ 1⤋