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The unexpected guest probably won’t stay among the asteroids for very long. Computer simulations show he will have another close encounter with Jupiter in about two years. The large planet will fire the comet from the system and continue its journey into the inner solar system.
“What’s cool is that you actually catch Jupiter throwing this object and changing its orbital behavior and bringing it into the internal system,” said Carey Lisse, a member of the Lab team. of Applied Physics (APL) from Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. . “Jupiter controls what happens with comets once they enter the internal system by changing their orbits.”
The Icy Intruder is probably one of the last members of the so-called “bucket brigade” of comets to be kicked out of his icy home in the Kuiper Belt and Giant Planet region through interactions. with another Kuiper Belt object. Located beyond the orbit of Neptune, the Kuiper Belt is a haven of icy and leftover debris from the construction of our planets 4.6 billion years ago, containing millions of objects, and sometimes these objects have near misses or collisions that drastically change their orbits from the Kuiper belt inward. in the region of the giant planet.
The Frozen Relic Bucket Brigade endures a bumpy ride on their journey to the sun. They gravitationally bounce from one outer planet to another in a celestial pinball game before reaching the inner solar system, heating up as they get closer to the Sun. Researchers say objects spend as much time, if not more, around giant planets, which pull them gravitationally – about 5 million years ago – than they do through the internal system in which we live.
“The ‘short period’ comets in the internal system disintegrate about once a century,” Lisse explained. “So, in order to maintain the number of local comets that we see today, we believe the Bucket Brigade needs to deliver a new short-lived comet about once every 100 years.”
An Early Bloomer
Seeing outgassing activity on a comet 465 million kilometers from the Sun (where the intensity of sunlight is 1 / 25th as strong as on Earth) surprised the researchers. “We were intrigued to see that the comet had just started to become active for the first time so far from the Sun at distances where water ice is just starting to sublimate,” Bolin said.
Water remains frozen on a comet until it reaches about 200 million kilometers from the Sun, where heat from sunlight converts water ice into gas that escapes from the core in the form of jets. . Thus, the activity indicates that the tail may not be made of water. In fact, Spitzer’s observations indicated the presence of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, which could be behind the creation of the tail and jets seen on the comet orbiting Jupiter. These birds do not need much sunlight to heat their frozen form and convert them to gas.
Once the comet is expelled from Jupiter’s orbit and continues its journey, it may encounter the giant planet again. “Short-lived comets like LD2 meet their fate by being thrown into the Sun and totally disintegrating, hitting a planet or again venturing too close to Jupiter and being kicked out of the solar system, which is the usual fate, ”Lisse said. “The simulations show that in about 500,000 years, there is a 90% chance that this object will be ejected from the solar system and become an interstellar comet.”
The Hubble Space Telescope is an international cooperation project between NASA and ESA (European Space Agency). NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland operates the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts science operations at Hubble. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Astronomical Research, Washington, DC NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, Calif., Managed the Spitzer mission for the Directorate of Missions NASA Scientists in Washington, DC Scientific operations were conducted at IPAC’s Spitzer Science Center in Caltech. The full Spitzer Science Catalog is available through the Spitzer Data Archive, housed in the IPAC Infrared Science Archive. The spacecraft’s operations were based at Lockheed Martin Space in Littleton, Colorado.
For more information visit:
https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2021/news-2021-05
http://www.nasa.gov/hubble
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