ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, April 6, 1996 TAG: 9604080028
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOHN NOBLE WILFORD THE NEW YORK TIMES
SCIENTISTS ARE STUMPED: This ball of ice, when closest to earth, emitted X-ray signals 100 times stronger than expected.
When Comet Hyakutake streaked close to Earth last week, a German scientific spacecraft made a discovery that has astonished and puzzled astrophysicists. The comet was emitting X-rays in a crescent pattern on its sunward side.
Cosmic radiations as powerful as X-rays usually are produced by cataclysmic forces. They are associated with the extremely hot gases spread by exploding stars or the tremendous accelerations of particles caught in the gravitational whirlpools around dense neutron stars or even denser black holes.
So what were X-rays doing coming from a comet, a relatively benign iceball?
Although some astrophysicists had speculated on the possibility of comet X-rays, no one ever had observed them or expected to detect emissions as strong and rapidly variable as those observed March 27 by Rosat, the German X-ray astronomy satellite.
The emissions were observed over a 24-hour period on monitors at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany.
Computer processing of the Rosat data determined that when the comet was less than 10 million miles from Earth, its closest approach, it was emitting X-ray signals about 100 times stronger than anyone ever had predicted. Scientists were also surprised by the pronounced increases and decreases in the X-ray brightness from one observation to another, typically over a few hours.
A team of American and German astrophysicists, led by Carey M. Lisse of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., reported the discovery Thursday in an announcement issued by NASA.
``It's just an enormous surprise,'' Robert Petre, an X-ray astronomer at Goddard, said in a telephone interview. ``We really don't know what causes these radiations.''
As a start, astrophysicists were considering two possible explanations for the strong X-ray emissions.
One hypothesis is that X-rays from the sun were absorbed by a cloud of gaseous water molecules surrounding the nucleus of the comet. Then they were re-emitted by the water in a process physicists call fluorescence. But if that is the case, some astronomers asked, why did the emissions appear in the shape of a crescent and not a sphere?
A second possibility, scientists said, is that the X-rays were being produced from violent collisions between the comet's atmosphere and the supersonic ``wind'' of particles and electrified gases known as plasma streaming out from the sun.
``They're plausible ideas,'' Petre said. ``But I'm not sure we know enough yet. We may need to correlate these data with other observations of the comet, particularly the behavior of water in the comet's atmosphere.''
LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: AP. Comet Hyakutake, as seen over Southern California.by CNBIt passed within 10 million miles of earth March 24. color.