Comet Chury in all its glory
ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM
Earth roras, we are better known for the Earthlings North or south lights, Not limited to the planets and the moon. For the first time, scientists have identified a similar phenomenon in a comet.
The discovery is courtesy of the European Space Agency Rosetta mission, famously landed on comet 67P / Churyomov-GerasimenkoAlso known as Comet Chury, back in 2014.
On Earth, we get auroras when energetic particles from the sun’s wind interact with our planet’s magnetosphere. When the researchers looked at the theft in the ultraviolet range of the electromagnetic spectrum, they were able to obtain a similar effect from a solar wind electron striking a gas cloud or coma around the rocky nucleus of a comet.
“The resulting glow is one of a kind,” Marina Galland of Imperial College London said in a statement. “It’s caused by a combination of processes, some found on Jupiter’s lunar Ganymede and Europa and others on Earth and Mars.”
Animation taken from images of the rotation and emission of a comet.
ESA / Rosetta / NAVCAM
Galand is the lead author of a paper on discovery published Monday in Nature Astronomy.
Scientists originally thought that data “Deglow “ – Originally only photons emit clouds of gas, which can be easily seen on Earth.
“Since this process is very energy efficient, the resulting glow is also very excited and therefore in the ultraviolet range, which is invisible to the human eye,” explains Martin Rubin, co-author of burn physics at the university.
Although the Rosetta mission ended in 2016, researchers were able to enable cross-reference data from different spacecraft devices and perform a complex analysis, which led to a new interpretation of what scientists were seeing.
What is not yet clear is what the name of the lights will be. On such a small body, the Northern or Southern Lights doesn’t really make sense as a moniker. Maybe it will be the “cheery lights” right now.
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