[ad_1]
COmet McNaught is a brilliant and magnificent mystery since 2007, when a group of stunned researchers from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, captured it on a satellite image. The earthlings who spotted the comet for the first time were struck by its brilliance and its strange configuration. Not only was it so bright that it was visible by day in some parts of the Earth, but it also sported many long tails resembling peacock feathers.
These tails are supposed to contain important clues about the formation of planets and moons billions of years ago, but for years they did not have all the tools to probe this issue. But that changed this week, when a Ph.D. student in London broke through the mystery of comet McNaught.
Astrophysicist Karl Battams of the Naval Research Laboratory has described it as "one of the most beautiful comets we've seen in decades." However, Comet McNaught had a beauty that had strange motives, detailed in the video above.
Usually, comet tails – called streaks – can extend up to 100 million kilometers behind the "core" of the comet, the block of ice or rock that forms its solid core. Comets actually have two tails: one composed of ions (charged atoms) manipulated by the magnetic fields of the solar wind, and a tail "dust" consisting of tiny fragments of matter taken from the nucleus of the comet. The tails of comet McNaught are famous among astronomers because they present a strange "disturbance" pattern – what should normally be clean lines is actually littered with small trenches, similar to what you might see in a dune sand in the desert.
"This result (and others) has shown that in fact the solar wind can also play an important role in the morphology of the dust tail," he said. Reverse. "So it's really exciting to have proven that something I learned in a classroom was (slightly) wrong!"
Price described them as "funny acts" when he first noticed them in images gleaned from NASA's STEREO and SOHO spacecraft. He was able to assemble these images, among others, to create a three-dimensional map simulating how each particle of dust moves from the comet's nucleus to the formation in the tail.
Perhaps most importantly, this simulation illuminated the source these strange ripples. When the comet moves quickly in space, dust falls from the comet's head into the tail. When this happens, the comet goes in and out of a sheet of magnetic activity called heliospheric current sheet. At this point, the magnetic orientation of the solar wind changes direction, affecting how the dust particles settle in the tail of the comet. You can see that this happens around 1:23 in the video, when dust particles penetrate slightly into the sheet and move slightly, causing interruptions in otherwise straight lines.
"This shows that the magnetic interactions caused by the sun can play an important role in the behavior of large clouds of dust," he says. This, he adds, could help us discover the forces that have shaped the moons, planets and comets we see today. This force was at work there are millions of years when the universe itself was only a giant cloud of dust.
"When the solar system was forming, it was actually a massive cloud of dust. This means that we must think of something else when we consider the formation of the solar system, "he concludes.
[ad_2]
Source link
