The greatest destroyer of worlds we know.
The colossal comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, colossal is perfect, it is enormous, it comes from the Oort cloud, the outermost region of the solar system populated by billions of comets, hundreds of potential dwarf planets, surely some interstellar objects since it is a region so large that it would take thousands of years to cross it and planet number nine, the hypothetical planet number nine, may also be there, the hunt for which by the way is becoming very interesting lately.
This giant comet that is on its journey towards its closest approach to the sun, a team of astronomers has made a discovery that they describe as revolutionary by detecting molecular activity in the comet, for this they have used the ALMA, Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array located in northern Chile.
Researchers observed this giant comet while it was more than halfway from Neptune at about 16.6 astronomical units, one astronomical unit is the distance that separates the Sun from the Earth and is equivalent to about 150 million kilometers, Neptune is further away at about 30 astronomical units, this giant comet is still distant from us, but one of the intriguing things is that it is already expelling gases and that baffles researchers. astronomers.
Comets create their coma and their tail by sublimating their ice with the heat of the sun. To sublimate is to go directly from solid to gas without going through the liquid state, but that begins to occur when approaching Jupiter's orbit, more or less at about 5.2 astronomical units or six astronomical units, approximately, that this giant comet begins to show gas being three times that distance is rare.
The new observations revealed complex jets of carbon monoxide emanating from the comet's nucleus which are providing us with the first direct evidence of factors driving the activity of this comet so far from the sun. Not only does the discovery mark the first detection of molecular outgassing in this giant comet unprecedented for its size, but this discovery also offers extraordinary insight into the chemistry and dynamics of objects originating in the most remote reaches of our solar system.
A suspected chemistry may be very complex and where there may be many organic molecules, a great abundance of them. As this comet approaches the sun, more frozen gases will begin to sublimate, the coma will form. The coma is the gas bubble that surrounds comets, it is like their atmosphere and it emerges before the tail begins to be created. This detail is important since the gases, that vapor that arises around the comet, will allow us to analyze its chemical composition and will allow astronomers to reveal the primitive composition of this comet, because it is believed that it originated in the early solar system.
These findings will help us answer fundamental questions about the origin of life on Earth, did life on Earth emerge easily or is it an extraordinary and rare case in the universe? They will also help us answer the question of why we have water on Earth, because it turns out that some organic molecules that are essential for us to exist need certain cold conditions to form, cold conditions that did not exist in the temperate zone where the Earth was being created.
The images without reference were created with AI
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