HONOLULU, April 29 (UPI) — A newly identified comet may offer insights into the formation of the solar system.
Scientists believe the comet is composed of materials that once made up the inner solar system at the time of Earth’s formation. These unique materials have been preserved within the Oort Cloud for billions of years.
This particular comet looks more like an asteroid, as it is rather dim and rocky and without a tail. Scientists call such tailless objects — which blur the line between comet and asteroid — “Manx” comets, a reference to the tailless feline.
Though similar in composition to asteroids found in the inner solar system, whose orbits have sent them searingly close to the sun for millions of years, the new fragment — dubbed C/2014 S3 (PANSTARRS) — has only recently warmed.
Observations by ESO’s Very Large Telescope and the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope suggest it was only recently nudged out of its hibernation in the Oort Cloud — a large ring of icy planetesimals in the outer solar system.
“We already knew of many asteroids, but they have all been baked by billions of years near the Sun,” Karen Meech, a researcher at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, said in a news release. “This one is the first uncooked asteroid we could observe: it has been preserved in the best freezer there is.”
Meech is the lead author of a new study on the discovery, published this week in the journal Science Advances.
Scientists have built a variety of models simulating the formation and evolution of the solar system. Most agree on the major points, but a main predictive difference is the ratio of rocky to ice objects found in the Oort Cloud.
C/2014 S3 is the first rocky fragment to emerge fresh from the cloud. Scientists hope continued observations of the object — as its materials sublimate on the trip closer to the sun — will offer additional insight into the nature of the ancient inner solar system. But researchers say they’ll need to locate many more Manx comets to get a sense of which models are most accurate.
“We’ve found the first rocky comet, and we are looking for others,” added study co-author Olivier Hainaut, an astronomer with ESO. “Depending how many we find, we will know whether the giant planets danced across the Solar System when they were young, or if they grew up quietly without moving much.”
