Science, Space and Technology News 2024
New research suggests that dark comets, which make up to 60% of near-Earth objects, may have originated from the asteroid belt and could carry subsurface ice that potentially contributed to Earth’s water. Credit: SciTechDaily.com
The findings suggest that asteroids in the asteroid belt, a region of the solar system roughly between Jupiter and Mars that contains much of the system’s rocky asteroids, have subsurface ice, something that has been suspected since the 1980s, according to Aster Taylor, a U-M graduate student in astronomy and lead author of the study.The study also shows a potential pathway for delivering ice into the near-Earth solar system, according to Taylor.
Comets are icy bodies that show a fuzzy coma, a cloud that often surrounds a comet. Sublimating ice carries dust along with it, creating the cloud. Additionally, comets typically have slight accelerations propelled not by gravity, but by the sublimation of ice, called nongravitational accelerations.The study examined seven dark comets and estimates that between 0.5 and 60% of all near-Earth objects could be dark comets, which do not have comae but do have nongravitational accelerations.
Then, the researchers applied a previously suggested theory to their population of dark comets to determine why the objects are so small and quickly rotating. Comets are rocky structures bound together by ice—picture a dirty ice cube, Taylor says. Once they get bumped within the solar system’s ice line, that ice starts to off gas. This causes the object’s acceleration, but it can also cause the object to spin quite fast—fast enough for the object to break apart.
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