SHOULD WE BE VERY, VERY AFRAID?

Wed, 20 Nov 1996 16:20:41 -0500
Source: HoustonSky@aol.com

Comet's new mystery companion is only a star, experts reassure

Diffraction effect -- well-known to astronomers -- makes it look bigger, brighter

Published: Nov. 19, 1996

BY GLENNDA CHUI
Mercury News Staff Writer

Did a glowing, Saturn-like object three times bigger than Earth start following a spectacular new comet Thursday night -- and then vanish?

Has the comet, called Hale-Bopp, changed course five times? Does that mean it's being steered by an alien intelligence?

Should we be very, very afraid?

Well, no and no and no.

Despite the buzz on talk radio and over the Internet -- including a photograph shot Thursday that purports to show the comet's mysterious traveling companion astronomers say the truth is much more pedestrian.

Comet Hale-Bopp, they say, is the stodgiest of heavenly bodies. It's plodding along on its orbit around the Sun, doing exactly what it's supposed to do, and it will miss us by 122 million miles.

And the mystery object? An ordinary star, bright enough to be seen with binoculars but not with the naked eye. It appeared much bigger and brighter on the photo because of a diffraction effect -- a type of telescopic distortion that's been known for centuries.

The photo was taken by Chuck Shramek, an amateur astronomer and radio newscaster from Houston who has been watching Hale-Bopp over the past two months. The comet was discovered in July 1995, and astronomers hope it will brighten into a spectacular sight worldwide next spring as it approaches the sun.

Shramek -- who describes himself as a ''wacky newsman,'' with an interest in UFOs and other strange phenomena -- immediately posted the photo on the Internet and announced his discovery on Art Bell's late-night radio talk show, which is carried by more than 300 stations nationwide, including KSFO in San Francisco.

''I was shaking,'' he said later. ''It wasn't even completely dark outside, and this bright thing kinda leaps off the computer monitor at me. I said man, what is that?''

Assuming that the object was about as far away as Hale-Bopp, Shramek estimated it must be three or four times the size of Earth.

The announcement set off a flurry of e-mail messages and phone calls to news outlets and astronomy groups. Some people were frightened; others were just curious.

Donald Yeomans, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who has been tracking the comet, examined a copy of the photo on Friday morning.

The mystery object ''looks like some sort of fat flying saucer, although it's apparent that it's a star image,'' he said.

By Saturday, astronomers had identified the star in question: SAO141894, a star bright enough to flare up on photos due to telescopic distortion.

The star would have been in exactly the same position in the sky as Shramek's Saturn-like object, said Russell Sipe, an amateur astronomer from Anaheim who runs a Web site devoted to Hale-Bopp. He said Shramek didn't see it on his star map because he had not run the computer mapping program correctly.

Sipe said he started the Hale-Bopp web site partly ''to deal with exactly this kind of thing. I knew the fringe elements were going to latch onto this. It seemed to me this comet was going to be prime hunting ground for everything from alien spacecraft to psychic projections.''

For instance, he said, when astronomers refined their estimates of the comet's orbit in the first few months after its discovery -- something that is perfectly routine -- some people took it as evidence that Hale-Bopp was changing course under the control of alien beings.

Shramek, he said, ''is way out in left field.''

But Shramek was sticking by his guns on Monday. He had just gone back to take pictures of the star SAO141894 -- and he said it looked nothing like the object he saw Thursday.

''I'm shocked at some of the personal attacks on me -- that I'm crazy, that I'm in this for the money,'' he said. ''It's been a draining experience. But I'm gonna put up with it and stand by what I said, and so there.''


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