The Hubble telescope captures the clearest image to this day of the interstellar comet

A new image has revealed the clearest packaging to date of an interstellar visitor who crosses our solar system.

The Hubble telescope and its large camera on field 3 had an incredible view of the comet named 3i / Atlas, which came beyond our solar system, on July 21, when the object was 277 million miles (445 million kilometers) of the earth.

In the image, a cocoon of dust in the shape of tears can be seen from the striks of the frozen core of the comet. The core of a comet is its solid nucleus, made of ice, dust and rocks. When comets move near the stars like the sun, the heat makes them release gas and dust, which creates their signing tails.

The venerable telescope is only one of the many who are used to follow the comet, discovered for the first time on July 1, while it zooms out on 130,000 bloated miles (209,000 kilometers) per hour. Its speed makes 3i / Atlas the fastest object that comes from our solar system to be observed by traveling it.

New observations, like those made with Hubble, make more light on the size of the comet. The small nucleus, which cannot be seen directly, could have a diameter as large as 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) or as small as 1,000 feet (305 meters) Through, according to a new article accepted by the astrophysical newspaper Journal Letters.

Meanwhile, other space telescopes such as the James Webb space telescope, the exoplanet survey satellite in transit and the Swift observatory of Neil Gehrels, as well as the ground observations of the WM Keck observatory in Hawaii, could reveal more about the chemical composition of the object. The comet should remain visible for the ground telescopes until September before spending too close to the sun to be spotted until it reappears on the other side of our star in early December.

But large questions about 3i / Atlas remain, some of which may be impossible to answer – including where it comes from.

“No one knows where the comet comes from. It is like dressing a gunshot for a thousandth of a second.

While the comet seems to behave like those from our solar system – as evidenced by the captured hubble dust plume – the speed of 3i / atlas is an indicator that it is a visitor of another solar system of our galaxy.

Scientists believe that he has traveled an interstellar space for billions of years. While objects travel in space, they experience a gravitational sling effect by whistling by stellar stars and nurseries that increase their momentum. Thus, the longer the longest 3i / Atlas has passed in space, the faster it moves.

The comet is only the third interstellar object known to have been observed in our solar system after ‘Oumamua in 2017 and 2i / Borisov in 2019.

“3i In particular is remarkable because of its speed,” said Matthew Hopkins, a recent doctoral student in the physics department at the University of Oxford who wrote a distinct study on the object. “This speed is very useful in particular because in recent years, I and my co-authors have built a model that allows us to predict the properties of (interstellar objects) such as their age and composition, just from their speed.”

For Hopkins, the discovery of 3i / Atlas was incredibly strong. The discovery occurred just five days after having finished his doctoral work, which involved a lot of time spent making predictions on future discoveries of interstellar objects. In a few months, he will start a postdoctoral research scholarship at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, where he will continue to look for 3i / Atlas.

During his doctoral studies, Hopkins and his collaborators in New Zealand developed the ōtautahi-oxford model, a combination of data from the star of the Milky Way and models of the form of planetary systems which could help astronomers to determine what should be resembled populations of interstellar objects. Now Hopkins is the main author of a separate preparation study on 3i / Atlas.

It is difficult to determine the age of interstellar objects, but Hopkins and its colleagues think that 3i / Atlas is about 67% of them to have more than 7.6 billion years-while our sun, our solar system and its comets have only 4.5 billion years, he said.

It is a pure chance that the interstellar comet entered our solar system – but it is not entirely rare, said Hopkins. We just don’t see these visitors most of the time.

“(Interstellar objects) actually cross the solar system all the time, in particular the smallest which are more numerous: 80 of the size of ‘Oumuamua (about 656 feet, or 200 meters, through) go through the orbit of Jupiter each year, they are simply too small to detect unless they get closer to the earth,” wrote Hopkins in an email.

However, astronomers are impatient to have the Verra C. Rubin observatory, who published his first images this summer, scanning the sky for interstellar objects.
With the solid primary mirror of the observatory extending to 28 feet (8.4 meters) in diameter, it can identify small objects, weak and distant – and it scans the whole sky every three nights, allowing the telescope to better see interstellar objects in motion quickly.

The co -authors of Hopkins believe that Rubin could spy between five and 50 interstellar objects over the next 10 years, and Hopkins is optimistic about the latter. Discovering more interstellar objects could help astronomers determine how varied or similar they are, especially since the first three have been so different from each other, said Hopkins.

“This last interstellar tourist is part of a population of previously unteaded objects that broke into the stage that is gradually emerging,” said Jewitt. “This is now possible because we have powerful capacities of investigation in heaven that we did not have before. We have crossed a threshold. ”

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