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Old 11-17-2017, 12:35 PM   #539 (permalink)
freebeard
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Thanks, I was thinking of 3200 Phaeton. That's in December of Current Year.

The linked article has the usual NASA theory of volatile gases:
Quote:
"K2 is so far from the Sun and so cold, we know for sure that the activity — all the fuzzy stuff making it look like a comet — is not produced, as in other comets, by the evaporation of water ice," said lead researcher David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles. "Instead, we think the activity is due to the sublimation [a solid changing directly into a gas] of super-volatiles as K2 makes its maiden entry into the solar system's planetary zone. That's why it's special. This comet is so far away and so incredibly cold that water ice there is frozen like a rock."
Comet C/2012 S1 ISON (14th November 2013) showed us that the flaring can occur at the the barycenter coordinate of Sun and the gas giants.
 
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