At 04:48 PM Monday 10/29/2007, Mauro Diotallevi wrote: >On 10/26/07, Ronn! Blankenship <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Wednesday, a normally-faint comet named P17/Holmes, which never > > gets closer to the Sun than more than twice the Earth's distance > > underwent an outburst which resulted in it becoming nearly a million > > times brighter than it had been a few hours before. > >Am I correct in understanding that astronomers don't know why this >outburst is happening? Are there any theories?
One possibility is a collision which threw up a cloud of debris. Another is that a pocket of more-volatile (lower boiling point) material was uncovered and vaporized quickly. Not sure if there is any good way to tell for sure which happened in this case, if either. -- Ronn! :) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
