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In 2017, an unexpected visitor passed through the solar system in a strangely elongated fashion. The interstellar object, later named ‘Oumuamua, was initially classified as an asteroid until measurements showed it was accelerating away from the Sun like a comet. This hybrid behavior led scientists to recognize it as a dark comet. object that looks like an asteroid but behaves like a comet Now a new study has doubled the number of known dark comets and grouped them into two distinct populations.
A: paper published this week Scientific Bulletin of the National Academy of Sciences details the discovery of seven dark comets, bringing the total number of known dark comets to 14. The study also shows that these mysterious objects fall into two distinct groups based on their orbits and sizes.With this latest discovery, scientists are learning more about dark comets and about their potential to deliver the building blocks of life to planet Earth.
The first dark comet was spotted in 2016, when scientists noticed that the trajectory of the near-Earth asteroid 2003 RM was a little unintelligible to your average space rock , whose surface outflow of volatiles pushes it slightly,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory researcher and co-author of the new study said a statement. “But try as we might, we couldn’t find any signs of a comet’s tail. It looked like any other asteroid, just a point of light. So for a short time we had this one strange celestial object that we couldn’t quite make out.”
The following year, “Oumuamua appeared on the scene, and scientists immediately made a connection between the two objects. “The fact that the first object we detected from interstellar space exhibited similar behavior as the 2003 RM made the 2003 RM even more intriguing. Farnoccia added.
By 2023, six more celestial objects with both asteroid-like and comet-like properties had been discovered, prompting researchers to officially award them the title of dark comets. “We had a large enough number of dark comets that we could start asking if there was anything that would distinguish them,” said Darryl Seligman, a graduate student in the Department of Physics at Michigan State University and lead author of the new paper. in the statement.
By analyzing their reflectivity and orbits, researchers have identified two distinct populations of dark comets in the Solar System: Outer dark comets, similar to Jupiter-family comets, have highly eccentric or elliptical orbits and are on the larger side. The second group, the inner dark comets, travel in nearly circular orbits within the inner solar system and are on the smaller side.
Researchers are barely scratching the surface of these strange objects.A recent study showed that almost 60% of all near-Earth objects are dark comets which may have been part of much larger bodies in the main asteroid belt, a region of the Solar System between Mars and Jupiter, before being ejected and breaking up into smaller fragments that are now closer to Earth.
Dark comets may play a crucial role in the origin of life on Earth. “Dark comets are a new potential source of materials that were necessary for the development of life,” Seligman said role in the origin of our planet.”
