:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 12.15.2006 ::
:: "Researchers Find Surprise in Makeup of a Comet" ::
New York Times
WASHINGTON — Comets are not all made of interstellar dust and ice, but instead may contain material shot from the heart of the solar system during its tumultuous birth, scientists reported Thursday after examining pristine particles of a comet that were brought back by the Stardust spacecraft.
The evidence suggests that comets did not form in isolation in the outer parts of the solar system as it coalesced from a swirling mass of primal material, the researchers said. Instead, they said, some of the hot material that formed planets around the Sun seems to have spewed off into distant areas and become a component of distant comets.
“Many people imagined that comets formed in total isolation from the rest of the solar system; we have shown that’s not true,” said Donald Brownlee, a University of Washington astronomer who is the lead scientist for the Stardust mission.
“As the solar system formed 4.6 billion years ago,” Dr. Brownlee said, “material moved from the innermost part to the outermost part. I think of it as the solar system partially turning itself inside out.”
The first results of Stardust, appearing in seven reports published in the Dec. 15 issue of the journal Science, were reported in San Francisco on Thursday at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
NASA launched Stardust in 1999, and the robot spacecraft met comet Wild 2 beyond the orbit of Mars in January 2004. The craft flew within 150 miles of the comet’s nucleus and trapped particles spewing from the body in a light, porous foam called aerogel. After a 2.88-billion-mile journey, Stardust returned to Earth last January with a payload of thousands of tiny particles from Wild 2.
The comet formed more than 4.5 billion years ago and had remained preserved in the frozen reaches of the outer solar system until 1974, when a close encounter with Jupiter shifted its orbit to a path between Jupiter and Mars.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 12:45:00 AM [+] ::
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