Keep Your ISON the Sky

For the Comet of the Century

This blue enhanced photo of Comet ISON was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The further enhanced photo on the right clearly shows the jet blast of dust on the sunward-facing side of the comet. Photo is courtesy of http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2013/14. In late November of 2013, the people of Earth may be gifted with one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring sights ever, something that you will be able to tell your grandchildren about. It may be an event to rival Halleys Comet. This event is the arrival of Comet ISON, named for the Russian agency, called the International Scientific Optical Network, which discovered it in September of 2012. This is Comet ISONs first trip into the inner Solar System, and it may be very memorable. So, where did the comet come from? Lets find out The Comet Birthing Grounds Five billion years ago the collapse of an interstellar dust cloud culminated in the birth of a star, our Sun. With its birth the solar wind was generated, and the infant solar system began to clear. Over the next half billion years the planets were formed, and they cleared out their orbital paths even more. As the clearing progressed, the rocky bits that never became incorporated into the inner planets found a home in between Mars and Jupiter; what we now call the Asteroid Belt. These space rocks typically range in size from that of boulders to several thousand feet across. But there are a few that measure upwards of 250 miles long, such as Vesta and Pellas. There is even one, Ceres, that is large enough to have formed into a sphere, makes up about one-third the mass of the entire belt, and is classified as a dwarf planet; at 590 miles in diameter, it is the size of our moon.

Orbits of inner planets are shown as large circles in this computer-generated snapshot of actual known objects as of July 20, 2002. Green dots represent asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. Red dots are asteroids that stray out of the main belt and pose a small but known possible risk of hitting Earth.
CREDIT: MPC, CBAT, Harvard CfA, IAU Picture courtesy of

http://www.space.com/16105-asteroidbelt.html

While the dense, heavier rocky bodies found a home between Mars and Jupiter, the left over dust and ice found another home. Out past the orbit of Neptune a large disk of icy bodies, and a few rocky ones (Pluto and several other dwarf planets and their moons), was formed. Predicted in 1951 by Gerard Kuiper, this belt was aptly named the Kuipe r Belt; and it is from here, through the jostling and colliding of these small, icy bodies, that many of the comets that we see come from. A year before, in 1950, Jan Oort predicted a comet birthing ground that would be even further out from the Sun, but this one would be an entire sphere of icy objects. This is now known as the Oort Cloud, and it is theorized to be at a distance of 0.5 light-years (4.65 trillion miles). Between the belt and the cloud, there are estimated to be trillions upon trillions of potential comets.

Artists rendering of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud . CREDIT: NASA Picture courtesy of http://www.space.com/16144-kuiper-beltobjects.html

A Quick Tangent When discussing the Solar System, you can see that the words million, billion, and trillion are commonplace. And though we mere mortals here are earth use those numbers a lot, it is mostly in terms of money. Usually, however, its used in reference to other peoples money; which tends to make us less than happy. Anyway, I digress in my digression. These are very large numbers, perhaps even painfully large, to wrap our brains around. So, being the person that I am, I like to try and relate these numbers to something a little more familiar. Lets take first the age of our planet. Earth is said to be approximately 4.54 billion years old. When I was a child, I wanted to know more about how long this truly was; so I opened up the encyclopedia to the geology section and asked myself this, if the whole of Earths history were condensed into a single 24 -hr period, then how long has mankind been around? Per the anthropological record, hominids broke off the line of other primates around 2 million years ago (theres that million word again); and modern Homo sapiens made their first appearance around 200,000 years ago; and, of course, the Common Era started just over 2,000 years ago. Lucky for us, everything is a two, making our calculations a little quicker. By using simple algebra, in our 24-hr history of planet Earth, hominids now appeared at 38 seconds to midnight; Homo sapiens appeared at 3.8 seconds to midnight; and the Common Era began at 38 milliseconds to midnight. Thats not a whole lot of time out of the day. I know some of you are asking yourself, Well, how fast is a millisecond? To give you an idea of how fast 38 milliseconds go by, lets perform a n exercise. Take your foot and tap it on the ground. The time from when your foot contacts the ground to when your brain registers the contact is about 38 milliseconds. Pretty darn fast! As for distances in space, its not too much different, only a little lengthier. The fastest bullet made by man is the Winchester .223 Super Short Magnum, which is clocked at 2,700 mph ( of a mile per second). Voyager 1, which was launched on September, 5th, 1977, has covered a distance, since then, of roughly 25 billion miles. By calculation, that puts Voyager 1s average velocity at 77,581 mph; nearly 29 times faster than the bullet! And after just over 35.5 years of travel (though not a straight line), it is only thirty-four light-hours distant. It hasnt even reached interstellar space yet; Voyager 1 (and Voyager 2, for that matter) is in a region of space around the Sun known as the Heliosheath. If it were to maintain its current velocity, it would still take nearly 382 centuries to reach the nearest star, Proxima Centauri; which, in cosmic terms, is our next door neighbor!

Estimated positions of the four Voyager and Pioneer missions. Picture courtesy of http://www.darkstar1.co.uk/heli opause.html

Getting to Know ISON Where did Comet ISON come from? Based on its projected orbital path, calculated by NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory, ISON appears to have been knocked towards the Sun from the Oort Cloud. The reason for this assumption is ISONs highly inclined approach with respect to the ecliptic plane; if it were to have come from the Kuiper Belt, its incline would most likely have been a lot less.

This comets orbit will bring it near the sun in November 2013. Some have predicted itll briefly shine as bright as a full moon. Then, unfortunately, at its brightest itll also be nearest the Sun, and possibly break-up and disappear. Image via NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory Picture courtesy of http://earthsky.org/space/big-sun-divingcomet-ison-might-be-spectacular-in-2013.

At 386 million miles from the Sun, which is almost 100 million miles inside the orbit of Jupiter, Comet ISON is already beginning to feel sufficient heat to produce out-gassings and an infant tail. Size estimates for the comet from NASA JPL say the nucleus is no more than 3-4 miles in diameter. The sun-facing side of the comet shows a huge jet of dust and water vapor, producing the coma that measures approximately 3,100 miles across (300 miles further than the flight distance from Miami, FL to Seattle, WA); and the infant tail measures a staggering 57,000 miles long, over 1/5 the distance from the Earth to the Moon. Lets give all these numbers a little reworking to make it more understandable. Imagine Comet ISON is a snowball the size of baseball. With the latest numbers, our snowball would be traveling at one foot per second, with a coma 258 feet wide, and a tail 0.9 miles long. It would be hurtling towards the 13.7 mile-indiameter Sun at a distance of about 6,100 miles. How long has ISON been its journey? This question will require some significant assumptions, so there will be a large percentage of error in this calculation, but at least it should give you a rough idea. The assumptions that we must make: 1) ISON came from the Oort Cloud, 0.5 light-years away; 2) though it was initially orbiting the Sun with an angular velocity, we will assume that its trek began with an initial inward velocity of 47,000 mph (its current velocity); 3) we will discount any gravitational influence from other bodies that may have changed its course of travel. The nice thing is, the 386 million mile distance that the comet is from the Sun is four factors of ten smaller than the 2.94 trillion miles that makes up the half light-year distance to the Oort Cloud. So, we can ignore it. Therefore, we take the distance to the Oort Cloud and divide it by the comets velocity; we arrive at 62.5 million hours, or 7,135 years, approximately. I hope there was a complimentary meal for that flight! What Will We See? It will not be until October that ISON will be able to be seen with the unaided eye, and it will be sweeping past the constellation Leo and the planet Mars throughout the month. In November, the comet will continue to brighten as it approaches perihelion on the 28 th. Perihelion is the closest approach to the Sun that ISON will get, estimated to be about 800,000 miles, or, from our reduction experiment above, about 13.5 miles. This will be the key time. If it survives the gravitational force of the Sun and doesnt break up (as often happens), then the comet will brighten significantly, rivaling the full Moon and making it a daylight object! Remember that night-time viewing of ISONs approach will be in the early morning hours towards dawn. Following perihelion, December may be the best month for viewing, as it will be visible not only in early morning hours, but also in the evening hours just after sunset. At this time it will be just as visible as the planet Venus, which is very bright indeed. The photo below will give you an idea of what Comet ISON will look like at its best viewing.

Comet Lovejoy was a sight to behold from Earth's Southern Hemisphere in late 2011. Here the comet is reflected in the water of Mandurah Esturary near Perth on December 21, 2011. Image Credit: Colin Legg. Photo courtesy of http://earthsky.org/space/big-sun-diving-comet-ison-mightbe-spectacular-in-2013.

Based on initial estimates of out-gassings and brightening, there is a good chance that Comet ISON will indeed be a fizzler, and our Comet of the Century hype will be all for naught. But, if it is strong enough to survive its trip around the Sun, it could be the greatest show in Earths sky in a very long time. An event that, for any and all that witness it will be remembered for the rest of their lives. So, keep your fingers crossed that our new resident snowball is stronger than it looks, and come the fall, candy will not be the only treat we get.