'American Idol' Castoff Colton Dixon Talks 'Weird' Song Choice

Christian rocker says fans may have been 'turned off' when he decided to perform Lady Gaga's 'Bad Romance.'
By Christina Garibaldi

Colton Dixon on "American Idol"
Photo: Fox

American Idol had fans scratching their heads two weeks in a row after another shocking elimination. Potential favorite Colton Dixon, the Christian rocker from Tennessee, found himself in unfamiliar territory on last week's episode, landing in the bottom three for the first time. Fans were convinced that he would return to the couch, but after 53 million votes, Dixon was sent packing.

What's the reason for his early exit? Well, according to Dixon, it was his song choice. The 20-year-old took the stage to perform two songs that night, the first being Lady Gaga's smash single, "Bad Romance."

"I'm like, 'I can metal the snot out of this song,' " Dixon told MTV News on Monday (April 23) about his thought process in choosing the song. "I just started getting giddy thinking about it. I saw the smoke and I was like, 'I'm in!' and I ran with it."

But now, Colton feels that the message of the song may have offended his fanbase.

"I had fun with the song, that was who I was and I had a blast with it," Dixon said. "And you know, it's not necessarily a bad message, we all want something that's not good for us, but that's how I took the song and I had to edit around some of Gaga's choice words to have it fit me a little better. But still, I think my audience heard Gaga and just went 'Oh, weird' and kinda turned off a little bit, which I understand. I take such a strong stance in my faith, I do understand."

Yet, Dixon has no hard feelings against the song, or Lady Gaga, whom he happens to be a big fan of. "I love her, I do. She's a great artist and she can sing her tail off and that's what I love," Dixon revealed. "She does whatever she can and whatever she has to do to stay on top of the music industry and she does a great job of it."

Were you surprised to see Colton leave "American Idol"? Let us know in the comments.

Related Photos

• Most Shocking 'American Idol' Exits
• 'American Idol' Season 11 Performances

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Thousands of comets orbiting new star collide every day, create visible debris ring

Comets, perhaps over 80 trillion, circle a young star that houses one alien planet and maybe more. There are thousands of daily comet collisions in the star's orbit.

A young star that is home to at least one alien planet is also ringed by a vast, dusty cloud of comets, like our own solar system. But there's a big difference: There may be as many as 83 trillion comets there, with collisions destroying thousands each day, a new study suggests.

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In fact, there is so much dust around the star that the equivalent of 2,000 comets, each a half-mile (1 kilometer) wide, would have to have been obliterated every day to create the icy dust belt seen today, researchers say. In an announcement of the discovery, European Space Agency officials dubbed the demolition derby a "comet massacre."

The dust also could have been created by few crashes of larger comets? ? ?perhaps just two collisions every day between comets 6 miles across (10 km)? ? ?but that's still a mind-boggling statistic, they added.

"I was really surprised," study leader Bram Acke of the University of Leuven in Belgium said in a statement. "To me this was an extremely large number."

An extrasolar Kuiper belt

The crashing comets encircle the star Fomalhaut about 25 light-years from Earth. Acke and his colleagues studied the comet belt with the European Space Agency's far-infrared Herschel space observatory, which spotted the telltale dust created by the constant collisions of comets in motion, the researchers said. [Latest photos from Herschel observatory]

Depending on comets' sizes, there could be between 260 billion and 83 trillion comets in the dust belt around the star, the researchers found. If you combined the amount of material in Fomalhaut's dust belt, the mass ?would be the equivalent of 110 Earths, they added.

Fomalhaut's comet belt arrangement is similar to the Kuiper belt of icy objects beyond the orbit of Neptune in our own solar system. Scientists have known about a dust cloud surrounding Fomalhaut since the 1980s, though now the Herschel observatory has revealed the ring in greater detail than ever before.

Past observations by the Hubble Space Telescope suggested the particles that make up Fomalhaut's dust belt were fairly large. But that theory was at odds with the Herschel observatory's temperature readings of the belt.

Cosmic comet crashes

Herschel observations found that the dust belt's temperature ranges between minus 382 and minus 274 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 230 and minus 170 degrees Celsius) on average. That would correspond to tiny dust particles, each a few millionths of a meter wide, researchers explained.

The starlight from Fomalhaut would normally sweep such tiny dust particles away, yet they persist, which led Acke and his colleagues to deduce that a fresh supply of dust is coming from comet collisions.

"Since we do observe emission from dust in the disc, this blow-out effect must be compensated by a steady production of dust particles via comet collisions," co-author Carsten Dominik of the University of Amsterdam and Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen said in a statement.

One side of Fomalhaut's dust belt is warmer than the other because it is off-center, possibly due to the gravitational influence of a planet. A planet was confirmed to be orbiting the starby the Hubble Space Telescope in 2005.

Formalhaut is a relatively young star, only a few million years old, researchers said. It is about twice as massive as Earth's sun.

The Herschel space observatory is the largest and most powerful infrared space telescope in orbit today. The European Space Agency launched the infrared observatory in 2009.

Follow SPACE.com for the latest in space science and exploration news on Twitter @Spacedotcom?and on Facebook.

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Career Workshop: Job Search Strategies | May 17 - SFU Business ...

Date: May 17^th, 2012

Time: 12:30pm to 2:30pm

RSVP: On Beedie Community (http://community.sfu.ca/beedie)??Beedie School of Business Calendar? under Events.

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Have you ever wondered how companies hire? Where do they find employees and what does the search process look like? What most people don?t know is that up to 75% of jobs are filled without being advertised on job boards. In this workshop you?ll learn techniques to help uncover this hidden job market.

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2012 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Career Management Centre and Co-op. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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