NASA Confirms Newly Discovered Comet Is Likely Interstellar Visitor

A newly discovered comet has excited the astronomical community this week because it is coming from outside the solar system. The object – designated C / 2019 Q4 (Borisov) – was discovered on August 30, 2019, by Gennady Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnij, Crimea. The official confirmation that comet C / 2019 Q4 is an interstellar comet, but it is interstellar, it would be only the second such object detected. The first, 'Oumuamua, was observed and confirmed in October 2017.

The new comet, C / 2019 Q4, is still inbound to the Sun, but it will remain more than 190 million miles (300 million kilometers).

The Scout System, which is located at NASA 's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, automatically flagged the object as being interstellar. Davide Farnocchia of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL Working with astronomers and the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Coordination Center in Frascati, Italy, to obtain additional observations. He then worked with the NASA-sponsored Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Mass., To quote the comet's precise trajectory and determine whether it originated within our solar system or came from elsewhere in the galaxy.

The comet is currently 260 million miles (420 million kilometers) from the Sun and will reach its closest point, or perihelion, on December 8, 2019, at a distance of about 190 million miles (300 million kilometers).

"The comet's current velocity is high, about 93,000 mph [150,000 kph], which is well above the typical velocities of objects orbiting the Sun at that distance, "said Farnocchia. "The high velocity does not only indicate that the object is likely to originate from outside our solar system, but also that it will be left to the interstellar space."

Currently on an inbound trajectory, comet C / 2019 Q4 is heading to the inner solar system. On October 26, it will pass through the ecliptic plane – the plane in which Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun – from above at a roughly 40-degree angle.

C / 2019 Q4 was established as a cometary ity of its fuzzy appearance, which indicates that the object has a central icy body that is producing a surrounding cloud of dust and particles as it approaches the Sun and heats up. Its location in the sky NASA 's asteroid – hunting NEOWISE spacecraft.

C / 2019 Q4 can be seen with professional telescopes for months to come. "The object will peak in mid-December and continue to be observable with moderate-size telescopes until April 2020," said Farnocchia. "After that, it will only be observable with larger professional telescopes through October 2020."

Observations completed by Karen Meech and his team at the University of Hawaii indicate the comet nucleus is somewhere between 1.2 and 10 miles (2 and 16 kilometers) in diameter. Astronomers will continue to collect observations to further characterize the comet's physical properties (size, rotation, etc.) and also continue to better identify its trajectory.

The Minor Planet Center is hosted by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and is a sub-node of NASA's Planetary Data System Small Bodies Node at the University of Maryland. JPL hosts the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies. NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program of the Agency's Planetary Defense Coordination Office within NASA's Science Mission Directorate.