Image: NASA/ STEREO
ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.
Advertisement
These features, among others, suggest that 96P may have been rerouted into our solar system by a chance encounter with Jupiter after its voyage across interstellar space. In an ironic twist, however, the comet's interactions with Jupiter have obscured its backstory and raised the possibility that its oddities could simply point to an origin in an unusual part of our own solar system, or as part of a local celestial body that broke apart. “Because of its interactions with Jupiter, I think it's going to be inconclusive, if not impossible to demonstrate conclusively, that it came from another solar system because that dynamical history is lost,” said Matthew Knight, a professor in the physics department at United States Naval Academy who has published research about 96P, in a call with Motherboard.For the time being, we’ll have to make do with the incredible images of the comet’s closest passes around the Sun, known as the “perihelions” of its five-year orbit. The comet completed its most recent perihelion on Tuesday, when it passed about three times closer to the Sun than Mercury. The approach was observed by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint space mission between NASA and the European Space Agency, which has watched 96P’s perihelions since it was first launched 1995. 96P was first discovered by the amateur astronomer Donald Machholz, who spotted it with binoculars from California in 1986. More recent observations have revealed that the object is bizarrely depleted in common materials, like carbon and cyanogen, and does not appear to possess the dusty atmosphere, or “coma,” seen around other comets in the solar system.
Advertisement
Advertisement