Nasa sponsored response to OCT 1 COMET/CME w/ Video Demonstration

(please embed video...thanks)

The "officials" have decided to answer our question.


The comet and the Coronal Mass Ejection article:

[link to blogs.discovermagazine.com]


This is a video response from Dr. Phil Plait

[link to www.youtube.com]




Article from Nasa sponsored Navy website: Big comet, big CME... big coincidence?

I'll begin with the story of what is one of SOHO's brightest ever Kreutz-group comet discoveries, which was first reported on September 30th, 2011 by four different amateur astronomers within nine seconds of each other! (SOHO comet-hunting is competitive...) It was discovered as it first entered the LASCO C3 field of view, or some 22-million kilometers from the Sun, and was already a bright object that was only ever going to increase in brightness as it raced towards its fiery demise.

Sure enough, by midday on October 1st, SOHO-2143 was saturating the C3 camera to a similar extent as Mercury, allowing us to confidently place it at magnitude 0 or -1 brightness. It reached the LASCO C2 coronagraph later that day, and we we able to follow it as it plunged at around 600km/s into the solar corona. And then just as we saw the last of its tail disappearing behind one side of the C2 occulting disk, we saw a huge CME blast out of the opposite side. A movie of this whole event can be downloaded right here (0.25Mb .mov file). "What are the chances,", I hear people say, "that a huge CME will go off right when the comet hits the Sun? They must be related!". That statement (which often haunts me in my sleep...) in itself contains the first two misconceptions that are a good place to start this discussion.
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[link to sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil]



What do you think of the explanation?

Last Edited by Surfeit on 10/04/2011 05:37 PM