Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 (SW3) Bulletin #11

June 1, 2006

Michael L. Sitko, University of Cincinnati & Space Science Institute

With the comets being close to the Sun in the sky and at southerly declinations, the flow of good information and photographs has been declining of late.

On May 7, the European Space Agency’s SCAM snapped the following image of Component B using the 1-meter telescope of their optical ground station in Tenerife, Spain. The camera, cooled to 0.3 K, uses a very fast photon counting system to record images. It not only tags the arrival time of the photons (useful for fast events) but also tags color (wavelength) information. In essence, it is a 4D detector, with 2 spatial, one time, and one wavelength dimension. It operates at visible through near-infrared wavelengths.

The May 4^th (0800-1200 UT) positions of 59 of the fragments are shown in the following image posted by Palomar Observatory. The lines indicate the directions of motion. Also see the nice movies of one of the breakup events of B at their web page.

This morning Seiichi Yoshida has posted the latest light curves for the observed fragments. As expected, G is essentially gone, while B rivals C in brightness.

Despite the over-publicized prediction by Eric Julien that fragments of SW3 would hit the Earth on May 25 and result in tsunamis along the Atlantic seaboard, it didn’t happen (no surprise). The “psychic visions/dreams” (!) from a “higher intelligence” (!!) told him that the “Missing Earth Crop Circle” (!!!) foretold of the event. It was supposedly somehow tied to a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran, as well. The failure of the “prediction” now (according to his own web site) has him looking to astrology (!!!!) for an answer. The UFO-based Exopolitics Institute that originally brought this “prediction” to the attention of the world (when Julien was a “director” in it) has since booted him out of their organization for “mixing his own personal visions and alleged extraterrestrial communications with empirical data concerning the fragmentation and trajectory” of the comet (May 26, 2006 Letter to the Editor by the President and Founder of the Institute). Although I have actively sought to remove any mention of Julien’s claims from truly legitimate press releases regarding scientific results on SW3 (since Julien has already received more exposure than he deserves), I do think it useful to lay this nonsense to rest in this more “informal” bulletin.

When will such nonsense stop?

For more information, contact:

Mike Sitko

Dept. of Physics, University of Cincinnati sitko@physics.uc.edu Phone: 513.556.0642

& Space Science Institute, Boulder, CO sitko@spacescience.org