It would seem that Asteroid 2003 EH is not undergoing great electrical stress, thus its' classification as an asteroid. Whether this is because discharging is to small to detect, or of its' orbital configuration, small size, composition (ability to equalize charge), or all of the above remains to be seen.
Certainly the distinction between comets and asteroids is a fuzzy one:
[url2=
http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/2006/ ... teroid.htm]When Asteroids Become Comets[/url2]
michael.suede wrote:Here's something interesting to think about.
If comets are a product of charge equalization and the larger the body, the more likely it is to have an explosive discharge, I wonder how a planet in a cometary orbit might look.
I know the saturnian cosmology espouses this view.
But if it happened in our solar system once, I would expect that as our telescopes get better and better, that we would see a cometary planet in orbit around another star some day.
It would be reasonable, a logical conclusion from EU tenets, to eventually find a planet with a cometary appearance moving on a highly elliptical orbit around some star. Technical limitations, especially with optical instruments, make that something for the future.
The EU proposes that "comet" is a description of the electrical state of a celestial object. Since this is scalable, a planet having the appearance of a comet is reasonable given the right conditions, and indeed this idea can be extended beyond planets to much larger objects, such as the red giant star Mira having the appearance of comet:
[url2=
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2007/15aug_mira.htm]A Star With A Comets Tail[/url2]
Also:
nick c