Starship Asterisk*

The journal Nature, yesterday, published online an article about an effort to empirically test what fraction of Lyman-alpha photons actually "escape" absorption to the point of being detectable from Earth: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v464/n7288/full/nature08881.html Nature's websi...

So, from that degree of porosity, and the statement (at the link jacklap cited) that "these results [new values for gravitation and density] are inconsistent with the proposition that Phobos is a captured asteroid", may I take it that experts (at least, at the ESA) are also leaning toward ...

It seems like everyone's forgotten the question originally posed in this entry: Why is this small object orbiting Mars? The similarity to C-type asteroids was pointed out, along with the difficulty that would be inherent in gravitationally capturing such asteroids, circularizing their orbits, etc. F...