Comets may appear like the ice queens of the Universe — shining bright, absolutely freezing, and unapproachable. But fresh data released earlier this year quickly melted away that conception and dazzled scientists, leaving a slew of new cosmic conundrums in their wake.
The discovery — For the first time ever, astronomers identified vaporized iron and nickel in the atmospheres of comets, leaving the field dumbfounded. The two papers, published in Nature, elaborate on the characteristics of both the interstellar comet 2I/Borisov and our Solar System’s own comets. Long story short, we don’t know as much about these blazing orbs as we thought we did.
INVERSE is counting down the 20 science discoveries that made us say “WTF” in 2021. This is #8. See the full list here.
Digging into the mystery — Comets are the icy dregs of the material that made up the Solar System. Their interiors typically contain metal elements like iron, nickel, copper, cobalt, and manganese. This makes sense when considering comets’ origin story: After all, rocky planets like Earth are full of the same metals.
Rather, the mystery is how there came to be iron and nickel gasses streaming from any comet, never mind specific comets we are familiar with here on Earth. Iron and nickel need to get to above 725 degrees Celsius to exist as gasses — baffling considering comets are ice balls with extremely cold coronas. The finding becomes more curious still when you do get specific — why is it that both Solar System...
Read Full Story: https://www.inverse.com/science/comet-conundrum
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