Turns out he was kidding, OtakuLoki. (Just thought I’d save you some grief.)
Exactly. I think the Vatican Observatory now located in Arizona is ample evidence the church never rejected science or astronomy. Galileo is largely a Red Herring and I’m amazed at how often he still gets trotted out.
Thanks for the attempt, Liberal. 
levdragon, I’d never heard about that and was about ready to reply angrily to you. I have to apologize for doubting your motives.
Massive sequential thread potenetial.
And it is so.
According to the link in the OP, one of the astronomers tracking this object is called Bin Yang. That’s a really great name anyway, and all the more so for an astronomer. Please, please someone give him some work to do on the Big Bang. It would be the best-titled science paper ever.
Yes, I actually do think that. Is it not?
Did you think I was being sarcastic or something? I was brought up and educated in mostly Catholic schools. I don’t really remember what I was taught in the early years, but by junior high, high school, and eventually in college I had nothing but hard science hammered into me. I’ve never had a priest, nun, Jesuit, Christian Brother or other Catholic lay-educator expect me to take creation bible stories as anything other than mostly that while always being held to the highest standards of current scientific thought. Why people don’t get this, I don’t know. I guess people just fixate on Galileo and the Pope condemning condoms and forget the rest. Intelligent design wasn’t concocted by Catholics. Christians maybe, but not Catholics. But Catholics get shit for it.
Some people opposed the creation of the atom bomb. That doesn’t mean they’re opposed to science, just certain applications of it.
That made me laugh. Thanks.
And thank you, for perceiving that my screed was intended as humor. I was becoming despondent.
Don’t dispair. The most talented satire is the most subtle.
Definitely not. Astronomy is a branch of physics, and the goal is to understand the universe, not just to catalog it. It’s also a branch of physics that uses the entire universe as a laboratory; astronomical observations often lead to new discoveries in physics, or serve to test and confirm (or discard) hypotheses.
For example, Tycho Brahe is famous for keeping a detailed record of the movement of planets. But the record isn’t the end product; the significance of the record is that it allowed Kepler to find the underlying law governing their movement. And that led to Newton’s discovery of the Laws of Motion. How else would he have discovered the inverse-square nature of gravity? In a lab, attraction between two objects is too small to measure (at least back then), and you can’t get far enough from earth to measure how its gravity decreases with distance.
More recently (19th century) they knew the orbit of Mercury wasn’t behaving exactly as predicted by Kepler/Newton. Einstein wasn’t specifically trying to solve this problem, but his theory of relativity successfuly explained the anomaly, which gave it a significant boost in credibility. Further confirmation came from observation of stars during an eclipse, which showed that light does bend, according to Einstein’s predictions.
I’d say 99% of what we know about astronomy was discovered in the last 100 years. A hundred years ago we didn’t even know what the energy source of a sun/star is. Today we know exactly what reactions take place in the core of the sun. We can even measure the rotation rate and density right down to the core of the sun. And in the process of trying to understand the sun and stars, we’ve discovered some new things about nuclear physics as well (cf solar neutrino problem). And by observing the solar corona, we are still learning a lot about how high-temperature plasma and magnetic fields interact - something that’s very useful to know if we’re ever going to construct fusion reactors.
A hundred years ago we didn’t even know there was such thing as galaxies. We thought the Milky Way Galaxy was pretty much the extent of the universe. We knew there were little spiral things in the sky (and made catalogs and classification schemes for them), but we thought they were just gas clouds of some kind. We now know there are maybe a hundred billion other galaxies like ours. And that led to the discovery that the universe is finite, and “only” 13.7 billion years old. (By the way, when I was in college less than 15 years ago the number was “10 to 20 billion years,” now it’s “13.7 +/- 0.2 billion”.) And in the process of trying to measure it, we’ve learned a lot about how gravity works over long distances, and there is some data that casts doubt on what we know.
Which brings me to another point I wanted to make: It’s a good thing to cast doubt on what we know. Science is based on continually challenging and questioning our understanding of the world. If we think we understand something and left it at that, there would be no progress.
Ah, I see the cause of the misunderstanding now. You’d asked me: “Do you actually think astronomy is about discovering and cataloging objects in the sky”-- which I believe it is. But that’s not ALL it’s about. I mean, obviously astronomers discover and catalogue objects in the sky (they do, don’t they? That job hasn’t been subcontracted out, has it?) but that’s not the ultimate goal. It’s not like stamp collecting; it’s not as though they’re aiming toward a complete list of every object in the universe, at which point they can say: “There. Done.”
It’s as if you’d overheard me talking about my job, and I happened to mention koala milking, and you asked me: “Koala milking? Is that what your job’s about?” And I might answer yes, thinking that you were asking me about that particular aspect of my job, and vaguely unnerved by your surly, confrontational attitude (never suspecting that your sister had been cruelly seduced and abandoned by a koala milker from Brisbane).
But if you’d asked me, “Is your job ALL about koala milking?” I then would be able to explain that my job actually encompasses many aspects of the marsupial dairy industry, and go on to wax expansive about my enthusiasm for the field in general-- the smooth, creamy flavor of wallaby yogurt; the tart, summery bouquet of numbat cheese-- until finally all your prejudices had been swept away.
Then someone from the University of Hawaii’s Institute of Astronomy would break into the conversation to mention: “Say, did you know that the koala is the largest animal in the Solar System? If you simply redefine all koalas on the planet as a single individual, you arrive at a roughly spherical koala approximately 8000 miles in diameter–” At which point you and I would both pick up our pool cues and beat them into oblivion.
Though you must admit a roughly spherical koala 8000 miles across would be awesome in a rather disturbing way.
(And how many servings of Solar System does it take to cover your daily vegetable requirement?)
Well, it turns out that the Solar System is apparently a eucalyptus tree. Otherwise it wouldn’t have a koala in it.
Exactly which Holmes was this “largest object in the solar system” named for? John?
Sailboat
Comets are named after the person who discovered it. This one is named after Edwin Holmes; judging from this short Wikipedia article, his only notable accomplishment is the discovery of this comet.
Rats! I was hoping that it WAS named after John Holmes and maybe because it had such a big appendage. “Comet Johnny Wadd” has a nice ring to it.
Of course, a dust cloud bigger than the Sun is still pretty freaky, as is the idea of a little comet blowing up into one.
Well, since that’s what most nebulae are: dust clouds bigger than the Sun, I mean, it just never twigged my radar. Many of the opaque nebulae are light years across.
And, well, comets coming inside the orbit of Jupiter tend to be very violent locations. It was the Giotti probe that actually got some very grainy photographs of a cometary nucleus in eruption during the most recent return of Halley’s Comet to the inner Solar System.
