Interstellar Comet 3i / Atlas slope as it passes through the solar system
NASA / JPL-Caltech
An interstellar thing currently passing through our solar system can be one of the oldest comets we see, which comes from a star billion years of age than ourselves.
Comet 3i / atlass took place In the past this month Near the jupiter orbit, approximately 20 kilometers across and move about 60 kilometers one second. This is the third known intention of interstellar to be found in our solar system, and will disappear on Mars in October before staying away from our day.
Matthew Hopkins At the University of Oxford and his companions worn in the comet and the disposal of exercise in which it is from, using data from Gaia Spacecraft of Gaia Spacecraft in European Agency map of a billion stars in our 13-billion years of galaxy. It seems that it comes from a region of our galaxy called thick disc, with older stars and sits on the thin disc where our orbits of the day.
“The thickest objects of the disc faster,” said Hopkins, while the first two informed items in interstellar – ‘Oumuamua in 2017 and Comet Borisov in 2019 – slow. “Their speeds are what we expect for a thin thing on the disc.”
Team modeling suggests 3I / Atlas from a star at least 8 billion years old, almost twice as old as our day, and maybe older. “It could be the oldest comet we saw,” said Hopkins. Thinking that interstellar items are more likely to be ejected early in the life of a star, may be functioning by passing the stars or interviews with giant planets.
Older stars are likely to have a low metal content than our day, which also results in a higher water content for their comets, as the Hopkins. If that’s true, we can start watching a lot of spewing water from comet as it approaches the day in the coming months.
This may be the first meeting of another star, which gives us a view of material material billions of years is older than land. “We think most of the interstellar things we can see can give a star for the first time, even if they are 8 billion years old,” said Hopkins. “They would have wandered in deep space until they approached us.”
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