[X] My Assistant

[Guest_paulanderson_*]

I thought the analysis results, as they come in, deserved their own thread. I'm interested in how these findings relate to the "weird crystals" found and reported on in the previous Nature article.

A couple more updates, from Space.com and MSNBC:

Stardust Mission Yields Ancient Comet Dust
http://space.com/scienceastronomy/060220_s...ust_update.html

Comet Dust Sparks Scientific Intrigue
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/11460590

"The early results reveal that the 4.5 billion-year-old comet contains iron, sulfides, glassy materials, olivine, and what the scientists termed potentially interesting isotopic traces. They believe that these materials were also available during the formation of other objects in our solar system.

What's even more amazing is how well the first round of analysis is matching expectations. Brownlee and other Stardust scientists are holding back their first formal reports for a scientific meeting in Texas next month — but during Monday's news conference, Brownlee said the samples studied so far contain iron sulfides and glassy material such as crystalline silicates. Those ingredients are found in meteorites as well.

Later, Brownlee told MSNBC.com that there were preliminary indications of organic compounds, based on telltale infrared readings. He cautioned that the initial indications were tentative and could still be traced to contaminants.

In the weeks and months ahead, Sandford and his team will be analyzing the types of carbon found in the samples — not only to trace the organics, but also to determine whether such compounds predated the formation of the solar system."

[edstrick]

"Is the language of science so inprecise that astonishingly weird means the same thing as amazingly close to expectations? Is it astonishingly weird that the initial results are amazingly close to expectations, or were they amazed to expect such astonishingly weird results? "

This is not the languate of science. It's the language of press-release, reporters, and off-the-cuff scientists trying to 1) give something utterly esoteric simple comprehensibility, and 2) boost public enthusiasm for the discoveries.

The "dirty snowball model" has been widely trumpeted as "overturned" but it's long if ever that the real "best consensus understanding" of a comet's nucleus was like a hard-packed re-frozen snowball with dirt.... that phrase has been an over-familiar "quick and dirty" descriptive phrase that took on a life and a pseudo-scientific reality of it's own.

[The Messenger]

"Is the language of science so inprecise that astonishingly weird means the same thing as amazingly close to expectations? Is it astonishingly weird that the initial results are amazingly close to expectations, or were they amazed to expect such astonishingly weird results "

This is not the languate of science. It's the language of press-release, reporters, and off-the-cuff scientists trying to 1) give something utterly esoteric simple comprehensibility, and 2) boost public enthusiasm for the discoveries.

Well, they have my attention. I think if you attach an excited London'rs voice to the first article, and a "Hell, we already knowed that" Texas drawl to the second article, you can see the unexpanded truth is somewhere in between.

The "dirty snowball model" has been widely trumpeted as "overturned" but it's long if ever that the real "best consensus understanding" of a comet's nucleus was like a hard-packed re-frozen snowball with dirt.... that phrase has been an over-familiar "quick and dirty" descriptive phrase that took on a life and a pseudo-scientific reality of it's own.

True, but for the decades leading up to the comet chasing missions (Borelly, Haley) Zwicky's dirty snowball WAS the prevailing model. In any case, the moisture content in Tempel 1, and likely many comets, is much less than expected, and if you could tell Zwicky the predominant material blasted from the face of a comet was fine dust and iron rich clays, he would roll over in his grave. The "dirty snowball" model as originally envisioned has been overturned, but for those following the science closely, this happened about a decade ago.

I think it is very legitimate, at this time, to rise the question: If we need an explanation for why the earth has oceans, the collision of objects like Saturns icy moons, rather than comets as we now know them, seems a little more likely. True, the comets we see may have once been much more like these icy moons, boiling off surface ice over millennia of close encounters with the sun.

The astrophysical sciences are being rewritten, and it is fun to be part of the process.