The comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is the largest telescope has ever seen, and it will fly very close to the moon. A new analysis of the data we've collected has revealed something surprising.
Researchers have discovered thatBB became active much earlier and farther out from the Sun than was previously thought.
Light from the Sun causes a comet to become active when it turns ice to vapor and releases trapped dust. Astronomers can use the coma to figure out what a comet is made out of.
It's too far out for water to sublimate. The emerging fog is likely to be driven by a slow release of carbon monoxide, based on studies of comets. Only one comet has been directly observed at a greater distance from the Sun.
Tony Farnham, astronomer from the University of Maryland, says that the distances for active comets have been pushed dramatically farther.
The researchers had to combine multiple snapshots from TESS to get a better look at the comet.
The size of the comet and its distance from the Sun are clues to the presence of carbon monoxide. Based on what we know about carbon monoxide, it is likely thatBB was already producing a coma before it came near our telescopes.
"We assume that cometBB was active even farther out, but we didn't see it before this," says Farnham.
We don't know if we can see these things in cold storage before they become active.
By repeating the image stacking technique on objects from the Kuiper belt, the researchers were able to confirm that their methods were sound, and that activity they'd spotted aroundBB wasn't just a blurring effect caused by putting several images on top of each other.
Calculating where individual comets have come from and tracing back the history of our Solar System are both useful to astronomy. That's the case forBB, which is of great interest to experts.
As our telescopes and probes get even more powerful, the comet discoveries are going to keep coming, whether that's finding the rare comet types out in space, or finding comets with chemical compositions that are a long way from the norm.
"This is just the beginning," he says. 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 while they are far away from the Sun, and we can do this a lot.
The research was published in a journal.
