We know the general composition very well, but it's the details of the composition that differ from comet to comet. We know that they're composed of various frozen gasses, primarily water, which in space would be a gas because it can't be a liquid out there - but also things like carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane and so on. We know the general composition of comets very well. So, yeah, it puts out that nice neon-greenish color.ĭo we have a pretty good idea of the composition of comets generally and of this comet in particular? Can we get information from analyzing the outgassing that we can detect? These all shine very brightly in the blue, some in the ultraviolet, some more in the green. And that green comes from emission lines of excited atoms of carbon actually - carbon and hydroxide ion. Hammergren: So most comets that show a pretty strong gas emission coming off, they'll have that same hue to it. The comet appears to have a greenish hue to it. It all depends on whether it encounters another object and has its orbit shifted ever so slightly to make it come back or get kicked out further. Hammergren: That's still an open question. Is it definitely going to exit the solar system or will it just go on to such a very long elliptical orbit that we're not going to see it again for millennia? In any case, it is never coming back after it goes out. This may very well be its first pass by the sun and on the way out. That means it is not in a closed orbit around the sun. Hammergren: The latest orbit determination shows that this comet has a very slightly hyperbolic orbit. As best we can tell, do we have a sense as to what the orbit of this comet is? In terms of this particular comet, there are varying reports as to it last passing by the Earth anywhere from 10,000 years ago to 50,000 years ago - or maybe this is the first time it's ever passed by. So, so it's a fantastic instrument for finding new objects like that. And so the ZTF has discovered many asteroids and many comets, which moved throughout the inner solar system. But in addition to finding changing objects in the distant universe, they also look through everything in between, including our own solar system. Mapping those out and finding out how far away those are shine a light on the large scale structure of the universe. They're particularly going for gamma-ray bursts, which are very distant explosions. That's a system and observing telescope and camera that are set up to observe large areas of the sky looking for transient objects: changing objects that most often are things like variable stars. Mark Hammergren: The discovery was made pretty much automatically by something called the Zwicky Transient Facility. It was discovered in March, but tell me how it was discovered and a little bit of what we know about it so far. ![]() WTTW News: This new comet which will shortly be visible from Earth. Below is a Q&A discussing this rare comet visitation with Mark Hammergren, astronomer and president and CEO of Farther Horizons LLC.
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