Asteroids

Historic planetary instability and catastrophe. Evidence for electrical scarring on planets and moons. Electrical events in today's solar system. Electric Earth.

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CosmicLettuce
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New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by CosmicLettuce » Tue Dec 23, 2014 8:46 am

New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs
We present initial observations of the newly-discovered active asteroid 313P/Gibbs (formerly P/2014 S4), taken to characterize its nucleus and comet-like activity. The central object has a radius ∼0.5 km (geometric albedo 0.05 assumed). We find no evidence for secondary nuclei and set (with qualifications) an upper limit to the radii of such objects near 25 m, assuming the same albedo. Both aperture photometry and a morphological analysis of the ejected dust show that mass-loss is continuous at rates ∼0.2 to 0.4 kg s−1, inconsistent with an impact origin. Large dust particles, with radii ∼50 to 100 μm, dominate the optical appearance. At 2.4 AU from the Sun, the surface equilibrium temperatures are too low for thermal or desiccation stresses to be responsible for the ejection of dust. No gas is spectroscopically detected (limiting the gas mass loss rate to <1.8 kg s−1). However, the protracted emission of dust seen in our data and the detection of another episode of dust release near perihelion, in archival observations from 2003, are highly suggestive of an origin by the sublimation of ice. Coincidentally, the orbit of 313P/Gibbs is similar to those of several active asteroids independently suspected to be ice sublimators, including P/2012 T1, 238P/Read and 133P/Elst-Pizarro, suggesting that ice is abundant in the outer asteroid belt.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6582

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paladin17
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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by paladin17 » Wed Dec 24, 2014 11:54 am

Thanks a lot.
Here it is stated that there are 13 ateroids that have become comets (and a hundred of supposed candidates). I guess that makes it 14.

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viscount aero
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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by viscount aero » Sat Dec 27, 2014 4:45 pm

It doesn't occur to them that comets and asteroids are probably the same phenomena. They need nebular collapse and ice sublimation to exist so they deny this.

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by Rossim » Sun Jan 04, 2015 11:48 am

The problem is that they are starting to believe that comets and asteroids are the same phenomena, but they're still retaining the sublimation model by adding unfalsifiable, imaginary volatiles to the asteroids. In conjunction with the low-density observations pointing to another "rubble pile" the snowball model is still the leading idea. Fortunately, once the dirty snowball theory is falsified on comets it will have no business being associated with asteroids.

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paladin17
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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by paladin17 » Sun Jan 04, 2015 1:25 pm

Well, to be fair to the current theory (about the comet 67P), it requires only 1% of the surface to be covered with ice to achieve current water production rates.
I guess we just have to wait until perihelion to get all the answers.

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by viscount aero » Sun Jan 04, 2015 2:35 pm

Rossim wrote:The problem is that they are starting to believe that comets and asteroids are the same phenomena, but they're still retaining the sublimation model by adding unfalsifiable, imaginary volatiles to the asteroids. In conjunction with the low-density observations pointing to another "rubble pile" the snowball model is still the leading idea. Fortunately, once the dirty snowball theory is falsified on comets it will have no business being associated with asteroids.
Yes true and that creates a conundrum for them already. As they remark more and more in PRs about how the lines are blurring between comets and asteroids, they are in contradiction to themselves by retaining the dirty snowball theory which is dying on the vine scientifically speaking. Even they know it but continue to downplay it.

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by viscount aero » Sun Jan 04, 2015 2:38 pm

paladin17 wrote:Well, to be fair to the current theory (about the comet 67P), it requires only 1% of the surface to be covered with ice to achieve current water production rates.
I guess we just have to wait until perihelion to get all the answers.
Even at 1% there is not enough ice there. Virtually zero.

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by nick c » Sun Jan 04, 2015 5:53 pm

It is important to note that the EU does not preclude the existence of water on comets or asteroids. Comets are objects, regardless of their composition, defined by their electrical state due to elliptical orbits.
Water on comets is in no way a test of the Electric Comet model. The essential test is whether or not the coma and tail are the result of the electrical interaction of the surface with the solar wind and not from sublimating ices.

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by viscount aero » Sun Jan 04, 2015 9:10 pm

nick c wrote:It is important to note that the EU does not preclude the existence of water on comets or asteroids. Comets are objects, regardless of their composition, defined by their electrical state due to elliptical orbits.
Water on comets is in no way a test of the Electric Comet model. The essential test is whether or not the coma and tail are the result of the electrical interaction of the surface with the solar wind and not from sublimating ices.
Great point. And 67P is still bone "dry like Hell."

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by Rossim » Mon Jan 05, 2015 8:52 am

nick c wrote:It is important to note that the EU does not preclude the existence of water on comets or asteroids. Comets are objects, regardless of their composition, defined by their electrical state due to elliptical orbits.
Water on comets is in no way a test of the Electric Comet model. The essential test is whether or not the coma and tail are the result of the electrical interaction of the surface with the solar wind and not from sublimating ices.
Yes, but how do you suggest they test this idea? All of the ices can be in the interior and escaping to the surface to cause the coma, as assumed by the new dirty snowball model. How can you prove that water is not on the inside of the nucleus from only exterior observations? Even if the comet broke up near perihelion, the EU would expect water production as will the snowball model. Maybe after perihelion if the water production is increasing as the comet moves away from the sun into a colder area, some questions will be taken seriously regarding the sublimation mechanism.

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by nick c » Mon Jan 05, 2015 10:55 am

Rossim wrote:
nick c wrote:It is important to note that the EU does not preclude the existence of water on comets or asteroids. Comets are objects, regardless of their composition, defined by their electrical state due to elliptical orbits.
Water on comets is in no way a test of the Electric Comet model. The essential test is whether or not the coma and tail are the result of the electrical interaction of the surface with the solar wind and not from sublimating ices.
Yes, but how do you suggest they test this idea? All of the ices can be in the interior and escaping to the surface to cause the coma, as assumed by the new dirty snowball model. How can you prove that water is not on the inside of the nucleus from only exterior observations? Even if the comet broke up near perihelion, the EU would expect water production as will the snowball model. Maybe after perihelion if the water production is increasing as the comet moves away from the sun into a colder area, some questions will be taken seriously regarding the sublimation mechanism.
My point was that the presence of water on or inside of a comet is not a test of the EU comet model, as we would expect to find (if we looked at enough comets) some icy bodies. However, the absence of ice on or inside of a comet would falsify the dirty iceball model as there would be no explanation for the existence of a coma and tail. The sublimation model has no means of explaining a comets coma and tail if there is at least one comet without any ices or enough to produce the observed coma and tail.

As things stand right now all of the comets that have been visited seem to be rocky bodies. The data received from these probes is consistent with the electric comet model as proposed before the probes arrived. That is, the model has not had to be modified after the results were in. The dirty snowball/iceball model had to be radically revised because it predicted a loose conglomeration of ices. When that was not found the model was modified to put the ice "hidden" in the interior. Of course, modifying a theory to accommodate new data/observation is part of the scientific method, but it does indicate that the iceball theory may be in trouble. Especially when the presence of water in the coma and tail can be explained by other means.

I do not see any difficulty in testing the EU model should it be given a priority by the ptb. I am sure that the skilled people at NASA or ESA could equip any number of data gathering equipment on a future comet probe that would be designed to specifically test the model, if they so desired. The problem is that they are not designing equipment with the EU model in mind. That is why the Philae lander was equipped with ice screws and harpoons designed to hook into the ice.

The process of protons from the solar wind interacting with oxygen released from the comet's rocky surface and combining to form water molecules (mostly hydroxyl) has been observed on the Moon. Why would not the same process account for the water in the coma and tail of comets? As has been pointed out before in this forum, but it needs repeating, NASA is aware of this process as well as the implications for the icy comet theory:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-345/ch14.htm
The assumption of ices as important bonding materials in cometary nuclei rests in almost all cases on indirect evidence, specifically the observation of atomic hydrogen (Lyman [Greek letter] alpha emission) and hydroxyl radical in a vast cloud surrounding the comet, in some cases accompanied by observation of H20+ or neutral water molecules. In addition, CH3CN, HCN, and corresponding radicals and ions are common constituents of the cometary gas envelope. These observations can be rationalized by assuming (Delsemme, 1972; Mendis, 1973) that the cometary nuclei consist of loose agglomerates containing, in addition to silicates (observed by infrared spectrometry (Maas et al., 1970)) and also water ice with inclusions of volatile carbon and nitrogen compounds.

It has been suggested by Lal (1972b) that the Lyman a emission could be caused by solar wind hydrogen, thermalized on the particles in the dust cloud surrounding the comet. Experiments by Arrhenius and Andersen (1973) irradiating calcium aluminosilicate (anorthite) surfaces with protons in the 10-keV range resulted in a substantial (~10 percent) yield of hydroxyl ion and also hydroxyl ion complexes such as CaOH.

Observations on the lunar surface (Hapke et al., 1970; Epstein and Taylor, 1970, 1972) also demonstrate that such proton-assisted abstraction of oxygen (preferentially O16) from silicates is an active process in space, resulting in a flux of OH and related species. In cometary particle streams, new silicate surfaces would relatively frequently be exposed by fracture and fusion at grain collision. The production of hydroxyl radicals and ions would in this case not be rate-limited by surface saturation to the same extent as on the Moon (for lunar soil turnover rate, see Arrhenius et al. (1972)).

These observations, although not negating the possible occurrence of water ice in cometary nuclei, point also to refractory sources of the actually observed hydrogen and hydroxyl. Solar protons as well as the products of their reaction with silicate oxygen would interact with any solid carbon and nitrogen compounds characteristic of carbonaceous chondrites to yield volatile carbon and nitrogen radicals such as observed in comets. Phenomena such as "flares," "breakups," "high-velocity jets," and nongravitational [236] acceleration are all phenomena that fit well into a theory ascribing them to the evaporation of frozen volatiles. However, with different semantic labels the underlying observations would also seem to be interpretable as manifestations of the focusing and dispersion processes in the cometary region of the meteor stream, accompanied by solar wind interaction.


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viscount aero
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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by viscount aero » Mon Jan 05, 2015 12:49 pm

Rossim wrote:
nick c wrote:It is important to note that the EU does not preclude the existence of water on comets or asteroids. Comets are objects, regardless of their composition, defined by their electrical state due to elliptical orbits.
Water on comets is in no way a test of the Electric Comet model. The essential test is whether or not the coma and tail are the result of the electrical interaction of the surface with the solar wind and not from sublimating ices.
Yes, but how do you suggest they test this idea? All of the ices can be in the interior and escaping to the surface to cause the coma, as assumed by the new dirty snowball model. How can you prove that water is not on the inside of the nucleus from only exterior observations?
Comets tend to fragment. There has been data on cometary breakups for a few years. On breakup [to my knowledge], Shoemaker-Levy 9, Comet Linear C/1999 S4, and Comet 57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte showed virtually no substantive amounts of interior ices or volatiles upon breakup. Based on this data, a comet appears homogenous and not differentiated into layers typically seen in a planetary mantle and crust system.
Rossim wrote:Even if the comet broke up near perihelion, the EU would expect water production as will the snowball model. Maybe after perihelion if the water production is increasing as the comet moves away from the sun into a colder area, some questions will be taken seriously regarding the sublimation mechanism.
I don't think sublimation due to a storehouse of water ice is a viable theory any longer. I think at one time it was a viable theory, but it is no longer.

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by flyingcloud » Thu Jan 15, 2015 4:57 am

viscount aero wrote:It doesn't occur to them that comets and asteroids are probably the same phenomena. They need nebular collapse and ice sublimation to exist so they deny this.



A twist on planetary origins: Meteorites were byproducts of planetary formation, not building blocks

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 40527.html
Then I had this 'Eureka!' moment where I realized that jetting during these really big impacts could possibly explain the formation of chondrules," Johnson says. "It all fell into place."

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by viscount aero » Thu Jan 15, 2015 10:08 am

flyingcloud wrote:
viscount aero wrote:It doesn't occur to them that comets and asteroids are probably the same phenomena. They need nebular collapse and ice sublimation to exist so they deny this.



A twist on planetary origins: Meteorites were byproducts of planetary formation, not building blocks

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 40527.html
Then I had this 'Eureka!' moment where I realized that jetting during these really big impacts could possibly explain the formation of chondrules," Johnson says. "It all fell into place."
That may be new to Dr. Johnson :)

Also that link doesn't work.

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Re: New Active Asteroid 313P/Gibbs

Unread post by flyingcloud » Thu Jan 15, 2015 10:36 am


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