The unexpected guest is unlikely to stay between the asteroids for long. Computer simulations show that it will have another close encounter with Jupiter in about two years. The massive planet will boot the comet out of the system and continue its journey to the inner solar system.
“The cool thing is, you actually catch Jupiter spinning this object around and change its orbital behavior and bring it into the inner system,” said team member Carey Lisse of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland. . “Jupiter controls what happens to comets as soon as they enter the inner system by changing their orbits.”
The icy invader is most likely one of the newest members of the so-called “bucket brigade” of comets to be kicked out of its icy home in the Kuiper Belt and into the region of the giant planet through interactions with another Kuiper Belt object. Located outside Neptune’s orbit, the Kuiper Belt is an oasis of icy, leftover debris from the construction of our planets 4.6 billion years ago, containing millions of objects, and occasionally these objects have near misses or collisions that affect their The Kuiper Belt’s orbit inwards will drastically change in the area of the giant planet.
The bucket brigade of icy relics endures a bumpy ride on their journey to the sun. They bounce gravity from one outer planet to the next in a game of celestial pinball before reaching the inner solar system and heating up as they get closer to the sun. The researchers say the objects spend as much or even more time around the giant planets, which pull on them by gravity – about 5 million years – than they enter the inner system where we live.
“Inner system, short-period comets disintegrate about once per century,” Lisse explains. “So to maintain the number of local comets we see today, we think the Bucket Brigade should deliver a new short-period comet about once every 100 years.”
An early bloomer
It surprised the researchers when they saw the outgassing activity on a comet 465 million miles away from the sun (where the intensity of the sunlight is 1 / 25th as strong as on Earth). “We were intrigued to see that the comet had just become active for the first time so far away from the sun at distances where water ice is barely beginning to sublimate,” said Bolin.
Water stays frozen on a comet until it’s about 200 million miles from the sun, where heat from sunlight converts water ice into gas escaping from the core in the form of rays. So the activity indicates that the tail may not be made of water. Observations by Spitzer even pointed to the presence of carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide gas, which could power the creation of the comet’s tail and jets around Jupiter. These volatiles don’t need a lot of sunlight to heat their frozen form and convert it to gas.
As soon as the comet is kicked out of Jupiter’s orbit and continues its journey, it will be able to meet the giant planet again. “Short period comets like LD2 meet their fates by being thrown into the sun and completely disintegrating, hitting a planet or getting too close to Jupiter again and thrown out of the solar system, which is the usual fate” , said Lisse. “Simulations show that in about 500,000 years, there is a 90% chance that this object will be thrown out of the solar system and become an interstellar comet.”
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international collaboration 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 Hubble science operations. STScI is managed for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, DC NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, managed the Spitzer mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC There scientific operations were conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at IPAC at Caltech. Spitzer’s full science catalog is available through the Spitzer Data Archive, housed in the Infrared Science Archive at IPAC. Spacecraft 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