REAL LIFE NEWS: HUBBLE SNAPS VERY DISTANT COMET
by Hazed
The Hubble Space Telescope has snapped a picture of a comet which is heading in to the centre of the Solar System – but it’s now 1.5 billion miles from Earth.
The comet is called C/2017 K2 PANSTARRS, K2 for short, and despite being so very far away it is already active. It’s developing a vast 80,000-mile-wide halo of dust as its surface vaporises.
David Jewitt, lead researcher studying K2 at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: “K2 is so far from the Sun and so cold, we know for sure that the activity – all the fuzzy stuff making it look like a comet – is not produced, as in other comets, by the evaporation of water ice.”
“Instead, we think the activity is due to the sublimation of super-volatiles as K2 makes its maiden entry into the solar system’s planetary zone. That’s why it’s special. This comet is so far away and so incredibly cold that water ice there is frozen like a rock.”
Comet K2 doesn’t have a tail yet, because it’s so far from the sun that the radiation pressure and solar wind are too weak to force particles off the comet into a tail.
K2 will make its closest approach to the sun in 2022.
Source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/09/29/hubble_spies_most_distant_comet/
