Fascinating! Last Friday I was closing some curtains on a full (ish) bright moon, my other half asked what the star beside it was. I told her it was Jupiter. She then asked what the very dim star beside Jupiter was... I didn't know so I opened the "Star Walk" iOS app to find out. It was 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko! We couldn't believe we could see it with the naked eye in a major city. Quite surreal to think that something mankind made is sitting on it...
Whatever star you saw, it was not the comet. You would have an easier time squinting and seeing the streptococcus on your teeth in the mirror than you would see the comet. The bacteria are both larger (angular diameter) and higher contrast against the background.
You saw another star, in the same general direction of the comet. But it's cool knowing in what direction that comet is, with our little robot on it.
Interesting… Last Friday (jun 30th) Mars and Saturn were both much closer to the moon than Jupiter, and depending on the time Jupiter could be below horizon already. The bright star next to Jupiter could be Zubenelgenubi.
As other pointed out there is no way you could see madnitude 22 object with a naked eye. You won’t be able to see it even with 10 meter telescope, unless you use something that lets you to integrate the light.
I really like the educative style of the article. It explains things assuming almost no level of pre-knowledge. I’d wish more scientific articles were written like this.
I could swear Asimov (or someone else) hypothetized that finding oxygen in a planets atmosphere would indicate the presence of life. Oxygen reacts so readily with other things that there would have to be a “someone” producing it. Guess he was wrong. I wonder what would suggest life if found in an atmosphere.
>The new analysis is consistent with team's original conclusion, that molecular oxygen is most likely primordial.
This does not prove that theory wrong. On the surface of an earthlike planet there would be plenty of reactive material to turn in to oxides. On the surface of the comet, that wouldn't necessarily be the case.
I knew a comet is not a meteorite, I just had the question lingering around in my head and was waiting for a tangentially related topic to pop up on HN, in the hopes that someone who knows would answer if or if not ever the spectrum of a shooting star aerobraking had been measured.
I ask because the composition of what remains lumped together, and the actual physical finds of remains may not be representative of the bulk mass originally entering the atmosphere.
So has distribution of optical spectra of shooting stars been measured? (this seems hard to me because one would need accurate tracking before it enters in order to aim the telescope+spectrometer in the right direction for the short duration it passes the atmosphere)
The reason I ask is because I have an idea on how to try detecting very faint objects, which may nevertheless be dangerous as rare impacts, or valuable if it turns out the material would be valuable in bulk before it evaporates in the atmosphere..
