Hot Day On A Cold Comet

Comet Holmes, until last month a dim 3km dustball even as imaged in powerful telescopes, has erupted like a nova, brightening a million fold into naked-eye brilliance in a matter of weeks.

Where did it acquire the energy needed to pop into a cloud the size of Jupiter? An asteroid impact? A satellite body ?

By  an odd coincidence, I weighed in on one new energy storage  mechanism that can lead to comet outbursts far from the warming sun  in a scientific paper in Naturwissenschaften whose basics were  reviewed in Adamant earlier this year.

This is not to imply we yet know what is happening to Comet Holmes which only takes seven years to complete an orbit , but that we have a lot to find out about energetic  phenomena out in the Big Cold-at present, the surface temperature of comet  Holmes is barely high enough to allow ice to sublimate.