Frozen visitor from a distant star
Icy, dusty comets from our own Solar System come howling into Earth’s night sky from regions so far away that our Sun’s fiery, fiery light and stellar heat are almost unknown. In the gloom of frigid, endless darkness, the tiny icy comet nuclei of our Solar System stand as relics of an ancient time when planets first formed, from a multitude of colliding bits of material called planetesimals–the building blocks of the planets. while the short period comets They reside in the cold gloom of the inner region of the scattered disc He called the Kuiper beltlocated beyond the orbit of the outermost major planet, Neptune, the long period comets dwell in the Oort cloud. Tea oort cloud It is a thousand times further than the Kuiper belt, and is believed to be a massive shell of dancing icy comet nuclei that encircles our entire Solar System and extends halfway to the nearest star. But a very special new comet, discovered on August 30, 2019, has proven to be an especially exciting discovery for astronomers:Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) is a family visitor from another star, and is only the second interstellar wanderer to be detected.
Coming to us from a star far, far away, this icy wanderer was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov in the MARGO Observatory in Nauchnij, Crimea. Borisov used his custom-built 0.65-meter telescope to make the important discovery of this incoming interstellar visitor. Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) it has a heliocentric orbital eccentricity of about 3 and is not gravitationally bound to our Sun. At the time of discovery, it was entering around 3 a of our Star and about 3.8 a from the earth. A au (astronomical unit) it is equivalent to the average separation between the Earth and the Sun of approximately 93,000,000 miles. The comet came from the direction of the constellation. perseus near the border with cassiopeia constellation and very close to the galactic plane of our Milky Way. It will travel closer to the Sun. (perihelion) around December 8, 2019.
As of this writing, an official confirmation that the comet C/2019 Q4 it’s an interstellar comet that hasn’t been made yet. However, if it is interstellar, it would be only the second such object detected. The first, nicknamed oumuamuawas observed and confirmed in October 2017. C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) shows a hyperbolic speed of approximately 34 kilometers per second. This is a strong indicator that it is an interstellar visitor to our Solar System, since disturbances can cause speeds of less than 3 kilometers per second.
Still incoming towards the Sun, C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) it will remain further than the orbit of Mars and will not come closer than about 190,000,000 miles to our own planet.
After the first detections of the comet, scout system–found at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, automatically designated the strange object as possibly interstellar. Dr. Davide Farnocchia of NASA Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL collaborated with astronomers and the European Space Agency (ESA) Near-Earth Object Coordination Center in Frascati, Italy for additional observations. She later collaborated with the NASA-sponsored center of minor planets in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in order to derive the exact trajectory of the comet and thus determine if it was born within our own Solar System or if it came to us from somewhere else in our Milky Way.
“The comet’s current speed is high, around 93,000 mph, which is well above the typical speeds of objects orbiting the Sun at that distance. The high speed indicates not only that the object probably originated outside our Solar System, but also that it will go out and return to interstellar space,” commented Dr. Farnocchia in a September 12, 2019 JPL press release.
interstellar rolling stones
In our own Solar System, comets are the leftover relics of the myriad ice planetesimals which served as the “seeds” from which the four outer gas giant planets were eventually formed: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Similarly, asteroids, found mainly (but not exclusively) in the handheld asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter – are similar to the rocky and metallic planetesimals which collided with each other and merged in the primordial Solar System to form the quartet of solid inner planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. Because comets exist in the deep, dimly lit ice of our Solar System beyond Neptune, they hold in their icy hearts the original elements that formed our Solar System some 4.56 billion years ago.
Until the discovery of oumuamua in 2017, comets from our own Solar System were the only ones known to exist within it. Yet small and dark oumuamua it was revealed to be the first known interstellar visitor to invade our Solar System. oumuamua arrived from approximately the same direction as the star Vega in the Lyra constellation. Also, the direction of the incoming reddish oumuamua it was precisely the one that extraterrestrial objects would likely take when flying into our Solar System from elsewhere. On October 26, 2017, two previous observations of Oumuamua, dated October 14 and 17, 2017, were obtained from the Catalina Sky Survey. A two-week observation verified a strongly hyperbolic trajectory, with a hyperbolic speed of about 58,700 miles, its velocity relative to our star when in interstellar space. Tea Catalina Sky Survey searches for comets and asteroids, and is carried out in the Steward Observatory Catalina Station near Tucson, Arizona.
In mid-November 2017, astronomers were sure that oumuamua it was an invading object from space between the stars. Observations made during a period of 34 days confirmed by Oumuamua orbital eccentricity of 1.20. An eccentricity greater than 1.0 suggests that an object has exceeded the escape velocity from our Sun. This means that the object is not gravitationally bound to our Sun and is coming from somewhere else. by Oumuamua the eccentricity is so high, in fact, that it could not have resulted from an encounter with any of the planets in our Solar System, known or unknown. This is because even if there are undiscovered planets lurking beyond Neptune, they couldn’t explain by Oumuamua trajectory. Yew oumuamua had a close encounter with one of these distant undiscovered worlds, it still couldn’t have sped up oumuamua to the observed speed. This was another strong indicator that oumuamua originated in the family of a star beyond our Sun.
new visitor
C/2019 Q4, currently on an entry trajectory, is heading rapidly toward the inner Solar System. On October 26, 2019, it will fly over the plane of the eclipticwhich is the plane in which the Earth and the other planets revolve around our Sun. The alien comet will rise above the plane of the ecliptic at an angle of approximately 40 degrees.
C/2019 Q4 it received its designation as a comet due to its fuzzy appearance. The fuzzy appearances suggest that the object has a central icy body that is creating an encircling cloud of dust and particles as it travels closer and closer to the bright light and molten heat of our Sun, and heats up. Its location in the sky (as observed from our planet) places it close to the Sun, which is an area of the sky that is generally not scanned by the large ground-based asteroid surveys or NASA’s asteroid search. NEOWISE spacecraft.
The icy alien object can be observed with professional telescopes for many months. “The object will reach its peak brightness in mid-December and will remain observable with moderate-sized telescopes until April 2020. After that, it will only be observable with larger professional telescopes until October 2020,” noted Dr Farnocchia. on the 12th of September. , 2019 JPL press release.
Observations by Dr. Karen Meech and her team at the University of Hawaii further indicate that the alien comet nucleus is between 1.2 and 10 miles in diameter. Astronomers will continue to collect observations to better characterize the comet’s physical properties, such as size and rotation, as well as gain insight into its path.
Dr. Meech believes that the comet C/2019 Q4 will be able to provide more new information about these icy interstellar wanderers than its predecessor, Oumuamua. This is because oumuamua he gave astronomers just one week to make critical observations, narrow down the data, and write a paper describing his new findings. But with the comet C/2019 Q4astronomers have much more time to make their observations and gain a new understanding of these celestial wanderers who visit our Solar System from far, far away, and are the evicted children of a star beyond our Sun.