2023-06-26 15:44:51
In 2020, astronomers watched a comet split in two. Today, 3 years later, they think they know why. Comet C/2018 F4 is believed to have originated in the Oort cloud, which is described as a “comet reservoir”, which is theoretically a group of icy bodies about 299 trillion kilometers from Earth, far from Pluto. The comet traversed the solar system on a 300,000-year journey, and split apart when it reached its closest point to the center, about three times the distance between Earth and the sun. A team from the Macau University of Science and Technology in China used telescopes around the world to determine the comet’s splitting factors. The imaging indicates that the comet was not a typical circular body, but rather had two lobes connected by a thinner neck, also known as a bilobate shape. As the comet approached the sun, it began to heat up, possibly ejecting material that caused it to begin spinning. The rapid spin, coupled with its unusual shape, caused it to split into two halves that went separate ways. “There is a point where it rotates so quickly that the two main components can no longer stick together, so they separate,” science team member Michael Kelly told New Scientist. “Future astronomers probably won’t know that they (the two pieces) were related to each other,” Kelly added.
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