The comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is 1000 times larger than a typical comet and is depicted in this artist rendition as it might look in the outer Solar System. The largest comet discovered in modern times is among the most distant comets to be discovered with a coma, which means ice within the comet is forming an envelope of dust and vapor around the comet's core. Credit: NOIRLab, AURA, and J. da Silva.
A new study by the University of Maryland shows that comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, the largest comet ever discovered, was active long before previously thought. One comet has been observed farther from the sun than the other.
Astronomers will be able to determine what is made of and what is not during the formation of our solar system. The finding was published in a journal.
Tony Farnham, a research scientist in the Department of Astronomy at the University of Maryland, said that the observations pushed the distances for active comets dramatically farther than they had previously known.
Knowing when a comet becomes active is important to understanding what it is. The comets are made of dust and ice left over from the formation of the solar system. The comet warms as it approaches the sun, and the ices start to melt. The temperature at which it must be to start vaporizing depends on what kind of ice it is.
The comet was discovered by scientists using data from the Dark Energy Survey. The comet nucleus was captured by the survey, but it did not have enough resolution to see the dust and vapor that form when the comet becomes active.
The largest comet ever discovered is 100 km from the sun, and it is far away from the planet Uranus. Most comets are close to the sun when discovered. When he heard about the comet, he wondered if the images had been captured by the Transient Exoplanet Survey Satellite, which observes one area of the sky for 28 days at a time. TESS's exposure times could provide more detail.
Thousands of images of comet BB were combined by Farnham and his colleagues. Farnham was able to see the comet better by stacking the images. Because comets move, he had to layer the images so that comets were in line with each frame. Researchers were able to see the hazy glow of dust surrounding the comet because of the technique that removed the stray specks from individual shots.
To make sure the coma wasn't just a blur caused by stacking images, the team repeated this technique with images of inactive objects from the Kuiper belt, which is a region much farther from the sun than cometBB. Researchers were confident that the faint glow around cometBB was actually an active coma when the objects appeared crisp.
The coma is dominated by carbon monoxide because of the size of the comet and its distance from the sun. When carbon monoxide is five times farther away from the sun than cometBB, it is likely that it was active before it was observed.
"We assume that cometBB was active further out, but we didn't see it before this," he said. We don't know if we can see these things in cold storage before they become active.
According to Farnham, the ability to observe processes like the formation of a cometary coma farther than ever before opens an exciting new door for astronomy.
"This is just the beginning," he said. This is a test case of what we will be able to find, because TESS is observing things that haven't been discovered yet. We have the ability to find comets once they are seen, going back through time in the images and finding them while they are far away from the sun.
The Planetary Science Journal has more information about Tony L. Farnham and his et al. There is a DOI of 10.3847/PSJ/ac323d.
The Planetary Science Journal has information.
A new study shows the largest comet ever observed was active at near-record distance.
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