A colossal comet never seen before marching towards the sun

A new visitor passes through the solar system: a never-before-seen comet that comes from the Oort Cloud.

The alien object was just named a comet on Wednesday (June 23), just a week after astronomers first observed it as a small moving dot in archive footage from the dark energy camera from the inter-American observatory Cerro Tololo in Chile. The comet is now known as Comet C / 2014 UN271, or Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its discoverers, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and astronomer Gary Bernstein.

The comet, which can be an impressive 62 miles (100 kilometers) wide, is 20 times the distance of Earth in the sun, towards our blue point. It will reach its closest point to the sun in its orbit on January 23, 2031, when it will be just beyond Saturn’s orbit, roughly 10.95 times the distance between Earth and the sun.

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“We’ll have almost 20 years to study it,” said Peter VereÅ¡, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Minor Planet Center, which identifies and calculates the orbits of new comets, minor planets and other distant rocks. body. This is an exciting opportunity, he said, because the comet is probably a almost virgin object of the Oort Cloud, a field of icy rock debris that likely surrounds the solar system like a crispy shell.

Unidentified orbiting object

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein made its first appearance in the 2014 Dark Energy Camera archives. Bernardinelli and Bernstein soon realized that the object, which looked like nothing more than a dot, moved over time as they traced it in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

Astronomers sent the sighting to the Minor Planet Center, which initially classified the object as an asteroid or minor planet because its surface appeared to be chemically inert. The report of the new object, however, prompted amateur astronomers to point their telescopes skyward, and some quickly noticed a “coma,” or haze of vapors and dust, emanating from the object.

“They found out, ‘Oh look, this object is active,'” VereÅ¡ told Live Science.

Comets are active because heat from the sun and solar wind cause gas to be released from the surface. It is likely that the surface has become more active in recent years as the comet has approached the sun, Vereš said, making the activity easier to spot.

A long trip

The comet takes about 5.5 million years to complete its orbit, which is vertical to the planets of the planets, researchers at the Minor Planet Center have calculated. At its farthest point, it is about a light-year from the sun. Based on its orbit, the comet is likely an emissary from a distant, icy region beyond the outer edges of the solar system, known as the Oort Cloud. Objects like comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein were probably once part of the solar system, Vereš said, but they were driven out by gravitational interactions with large planets like Saturn and Neptune.

Although the history of the comet is not certain, this new journey could be its first foray into the solar system since its initial banishment, Vereš said. This is exciting, because the short periodicity comets that rotate in the solar system are drastically altered from their original shape, fired and diminished by numerous rotations around the sun. Long periodicity comets like Bernardinelli-Bernstein that remain in the outer parts of the solar system do not change as much, which means that they are a time capsule of the conditions of their formation in the early days of the solar system.

“We are getting more and more sightings almost every day,” said VereÅ¡. To the eye, the comet always looks like a blurry dot and is unlikely to ever be visually impressive, he said; but the sensitive instruments of large telescopes may soon be able to detect changes in the light coming from the comet that can reveal molecules emerging from its surface. These data could reveal what the comet is made of.

Originally posted on Live Science.