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Interstellar comets like Borisov may not be all that rare
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| Borisov Comets (NASA, ESA and D. Jewitt (UCLA)) |
It is surprising that certain comets such as Halley comets are not very rare. Well, we don't know it yet. Comet is composed of ice with small solar system body, that, when passing close to the Sun, it releases gases which is called outgassing.
In 2019, astronomers spotted something incredible, a rogue comet from another star system. They named it as Borisov, and this icy snowball traveled over a hundred thousand miles per hour, and became the first and only interstellar comet ever detected by humans.
But what if these interstellar visitors - comets, meteors, asteroids, and other debris from beyond our solar system - are more common than we think?
In a new study published Monday in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers Amir Siraj and Avi Loeb at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) present new calculations showing that in the Oort Cloud - a shell of debris in the farthest reaches of our solar system - interstellar objects outnumber objects belonging to our solar system. The calculations, made using conclusions drawn from Borisov, include significant uncertainties, Siraj points out. But even after taking these into consideration, interstellar visitors prevail over objects that are native to the solar system.
Although interstellar objects in the planetary region of the solar system would be rare, but our results clearly show that they are more common than solar system material in the dark reaches of the Oort cloud. Thus, observations with next-generation technology may help confirm the team's results. The Transneptunian Automated Occultation Survey (TAOS II), which is specifically designed to detect comets in the far reaches of our solar system, may also be able to detect one of these passersby. TAOS II may come online as early as this year.
Source: Eurekalert