Unique Tailless Comet Was Made At The Same Time As Earth
Apr 30, 2016 @ 07:42 AM 2,000 views
Unique Tailless Comet Was Made At The Same Time As Earth
Brid-Aine Parnell
Astronomers have spotted a tailless “Manx” comet that appears to have been knocking around the galaxy since the Solar System was formed.
The unique object was preserved because it ended up in the Oort Cloud, far from the destructive power of the Sun, for billions of years. It’s the first ever space rock discovered that appears to be an untouched inner Solar System asteroid, formed at the same time as the Earth, but ejected quite early on in the system’s formation.
“We already knew of many asteroids, but they have all been baked by billions of years near the Sun. This one is the first uncooked asteroid we could observe: it has been preserved in the best freezer there is,” said Karen Meech of the University of Hawai`i’s Institute for Astronomy, in a statement. Meech is the lead author of a paper in the Science Advances journal on the discovery.
The comet, known as C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS), was originally identified by the Pan-STARRS1 telescope as a weakly active comet around twice as far from the Sun as the Earth. It has an exceedingly long orbital period of around 860 years, which suggests that it came from the Oort Cloud, but has been recently bumped out of place into an orbit that brings it closer to the Sun.
More:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2016/04/30/unique-tailless-comet-was-made-at-the-same-time-as-earth/#23caeca7157b
