We sent a probe SIX BILLION km to measure temperature of a COMET doing 135,000 km/h The comet-chasing spacecraft Rosetta has got close enough to its target to start getting temperature readings. The results show that comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko isn't the snowball some boffins were expecting. Between 13 and 21 July Rosetta moved within 5,000 kilometers of the rapidly spinning comet and used its visible, …
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The background temperature of deep space is usually described as being about 3-4K.
Which suggests solar heating bumps things up a lot, or the comet has some kind of internal process going on.
Thumbs up for field work, especially so far away.
My thoughts exactly. We've recorded lower temperatures on the third rock from the Sun (~-90C). So it's interesting that this object, receiving a tenth of the solar radiation, is warmer.
Oh, and a nice cold beer for the boffins involved.
"...the comet has some kind of internal process going on."
I'd put my money on some amount of radio isotopes in the inside. It could even have a liquid core and some primitive life.*
What puzzles me more is the crust of dust, as every time the comet goes near the Sun said crust should be ablated. I hope Rosetta carries some means to ascertain the composition of said crust.
*Both these hypotheses have been stolen'borrowed' from some of Gregory Benford's books. ;-)
> The background temperature of deep space is usually described as being about 3-4K.
To be pedantic, according to the article, the ...
> 4-kilometre-wide space rock moves around the Sun between the orbits of Jupiter and Earth at up to 135,000 kilometres per hour
Earth to Jupiter orbit isn't deep space, of course. Picking Mars as a handy 'somewhere in the middle point', night time low temperatures on Mars are -120C so the asteroid warming up to -70C isn't nearly such an unlikely jump as going from 3-4K
Celsius and Centigrade agree to within 0.1 degree. So if you know one, you know the other to within 0.1 degree.
Since the level of precision used in the article is either 1 or 10 degrees, either label is accurate.
NO international standard of measure requires the use of specific equipment or methodology to use, as you wrongly claim. There are specific standards against which any equipment or methodology must be calibrated and proven, but once properly calibrated any equipment and methodology which has been proven can be used.
I thought it was 0.01 degree.
You are correct. I'm not sure if I misread or mistyped it. But the point is that Celsius and Centigrade differ by a known, constant quantity which is less than the precision used in the article. So for the purposes of this discussion, they are interchangeable.
Never contemplated the difference before I have now read a little about and I am not making it fit with what you are saying. It seems that they are just two different names for the same scale. Where centigrade is the old one, centigrade, defined by water freezing and boiling and the new one is defined by that, but has moved the reference point to absolute zero in addition. It is however the same scale, just a new better definition technically giving a small difference. But that can also be said for all other units of measurements that change definition from time to time. The meter is still a meter even though we are not considering a platina staff or the distance between the poles and equator the definition anymore.
Further more as of any measurement you can never make them absolute accurate. Thus the unit is never tied up to the tool you are measuring with. I do not need to time light to measure the meter and I do not a constant volume gas thermometer to measure degrees Celsius. I can use any thermometer.
What am I missing?
Actually and Pedantically mr.K, Celsius is both the older and the newer name, but not for the same scale. Those of us with long enough memories will recall that Anders Celcius proposed a temperature scale on which water boiled at 0 and froze at +100 degrees. Thanks to the botanist Carl Linnaeus Centigrade became the name for a reciprocal scale based on Anders' degree and used for several hundred years. The new Celcius scale popped into existence mere moments ago (sometime in 1948 apparently, but much later in most people's consciousnesses).
Take home message: Will Kelvin catch on and become the universal temperature scale, or will an independant Scotland bring the Rankine to prominence?
I know The author wants to put the speed in a form that makes it relevant, however no one experiences speeds of that magnitude. The speed in km/s is 37.5, this is far more understandable to me. Example: it's about 40km from my house to the local mall. And it takes me (with traffic) around 15min to get there, so this comet makes it in one second or less.
The fine for speeding like that would be huge!! That is a measurment I CAN relate to!!
Why has speed got to be published in format that your tiny mind can comprehend? Modifying a measure to make it human scale is irrelevant. Do you want your quarks measured fractions of thumb widths, or light speed in how long it takes for your reflection to be seen in a mirror. What are you, a child?
"Modifying a measure to make it human scale is irrelevant"
In that case, what's so wrong with it? Is making things more comprehensible somehow a bad thing?
That said, this is el Reg, so speed should be expressed as a percentage of the maximum speed of a sheep in a vacuum. (1.2508% for those keeping track at home).
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