They discover an unusual chemical composition in an interstellar comet that visits us from the depths of space.

A space object could not have formed like a comet in the solar system, in a very cold outer zone.

NASA astronomers were surprised to find unusual chemical composition of comet 2I / Borisov, which entered the solar system from interstellar space last year, which provided new information about the origin of this space object.

An international team of scientists led by planetary scientists Martin Cordiner and Stephanie Milam from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center discovered that gas from a comet contained more carbon monoxide (CO) than was found in any other comet that it was less than 2 astronomical units from the Sun (less than 300 million km). The concentration of CO in the gas from 2I / Borisov was 9–26 times higher than in the average comet in our solar system, according to a study published on April 20 in Nature Astronomy.

“The comet must have formed from a very abundant carbon monoxide material, which is present only at the lowest temperatures found in space, below -250 degrees Celsius,” said Milama in a statement. ,

If the detected gases reflect the composition of the birthplace of 2I / Borisov, then this “indicates that formed differently than comets in the solar systemin the extremely cold outer zone of a distant planetary system, “Martin Cordiner added.

Astronomers still do not know what type of stars the system from which 2I / Borisov came from, but they suspect that the comet came from a cold region to a protoplanetary disk the largest (a disk of dust and gas revolving around a young star, from which planets and planetary objects are formed). “Many of these discs extend far beyond the region where our own comets are thought to have formed and contain large amounts of extremely cold gas and dust. It is possible that 2 / Borisov came from one of these large drives, ”he concluded. Cordiner.

Comet 2I / Borisov –second interstellar object Discovered in history, after an asteroid known as “Oumuamua” and discovered in 2017, it was discovered by amateur astronomer Gennady Borisov, who lives in Crimea (Russia) in August 2019.