The James Webb Space Telescope observes a frozen, comet-like object that fires jets of gas

With the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists have observed jets of primordial gas from the time when the solar system was formed being ejected from a distant comet-like object called Centaur.

The observations provide clues to how this centaur and others came to be, what they are made of, and how they eventually become full-fledged beings Cometsthe research team said in a study published in the journal Nature.

Centaurs once lived in ice Kuiper Belt beyond the orbit of Neptune. However, gravity’s interaction with Neptune, or even the occasional close encounter with a star, causes some of them to be pushed further inward, where they orbit the Sun in between Jupiter and Neptune. There the centaurs come under the influence of Jupiter’s orbit, which can draw some of them even closer the sunmaking them short-period comets that orbit our star in less than 200 years.

Over 500 centaurs have been discovered, but astronomers estimate there could be as many as 10 million out there.

“Centaurs can be viewed as remnants of the formation of our planetary system,” says Sara Faggi, a postdoctoral researcher at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Who led the research said in a opinion. “Because they are stored at very low temperatures, they preserve information about volatiles.” [gases with low boiling points, such as water] in the very early stages of the Solar system.”

Related: Which cosmic object “Arrokoth” can tell us something about the formation of our solar system?

One of the most well-known centaurs is 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1, which experiences outbreaks every six to eight weeks. Previous radio wavelength observations had shown a jet of carbon monoxide gas aimed roughly at the Sun, but JWST’s Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) showed much, much more.

NIRSpec detected a second jet of carbon monoxide (CO) emanating from 29P and pointing north (with respect to the plane of the solar system). It also detected two unprecedented carbon dioxide (CO2) jets pointing north and south.

What triggers the outgassing is uncertain. Regularly CometsGaseous jets form when water ice heats up in the sun’s heat, vaporizes and bursts through the surface to form the comet’s tail, carrying these gases with it. Nevertheless, JWST found no evidence of water vapor in the nozzles. This wasn’t surprising to the researchers because 29P is too far from the Sun for water ice to sublimate. Instead, it stays frozen. So what causes outgassing?

Faggi’s team can’t answer that yet, but the details of the jets point to the striking conclusion that 29P is not a single object, but rather multiple objects stuck together. Such objects are called “contact binaries,” and astronomers are finding more and more of them. For example, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which was visited by European Space Agency‘S Rosetta missionwas a contact binary as it was Arrokoththe distant object of the Kuiper belt on which the New horizons Spaceship on New Year’s Day 2019.

Centaur 29P is too far away for even JWST to disintegrate its core. However, 3D computer modeling of the origin points of the outgassing jets suggests that they are in different locations and that different parts of 29P are made of different materials.

“The fact that Centaur 29P has such dramatic differences in the abundance of CO and CO2 on its surface suggests that 29P may be made up of multiple parts,” said Geronimo Villanueva, deputy director of the Solar System Research Division at the Goddard Space Flight Center NASA research team member said in the statement. “Perhaps two parts merged and formed this centaur, which is a mixture of very different bodies that went through different paths of creation. It challenges our ideas about how primordial objects are created and stored in the Kuiper Belt.”

AsteroidsComets, Kuiper Belt objects and centaurs are all relics of the Formation of the solar systemand most of them have remained untouched for 4.5 billion years. Therefore, any materials we see outgassing date back to when our solar system formed and could contribute to our understanding how the solar system came to be.

The next step is to take a longer look back at 29P with JWST and observe if the jets change direction – perhaps the jets turn off as 29P rotates, or new jets turn on.

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