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The Hubble Space Telescope made stunning images of more than two dozen fragments of the ruined Atlas Comet nucleus.
The space telescope identified approximately 30 core fragments on April 20, and three days later 25 – read the website of the United States Space Agency (NASA). He works at a member institution of the University of California, Los Angeles. David Jewitt, who is the leader of one of the two research groups that made the dying comet appear in the lens, said the situation and appearance of the observed fragments were significantly different over the two days.
I don’t know if it’s because each piece is shiny or not, depending on whether they reflect sunlight. Behave like Christmas tree burners. Or because different fragments are visible in the two days
MTI quotes the specialist.
A rare sight
Quanzhi Ye, an expert at the University of Maryland, head of another research team working with space telescopes, says this is extremely exciting. On the one hand, because seeing such a phenomenon is a great experience, and on the other hand, because it does not happen very often. Most crumbling comets are too weak to see. An event of this volume occurs once or twice per decade.
According to the researchers, the results show that the fragmentation of comets is a relatively common phenomenon: this may be the main mechanism by which the icy, compact nucleus of comets dies. However, as the process progresses rapidly and unpredictably, astronomers are unsure of the cause of the fragmentation, but the recordings now released may help to better understand the phenomenon.
It happened suddenly
The brightness of the Atlas, discovered last December, increased rapidly until mid-March, and some astronomers believed that it would be visible to the naked eye in May, making it one of the most spectacular comets in the past 20 years.
However, the celestial body suddenly began to fade and experts concluded that the comet’s nucleus had begun to break or break. The fragmentation was also confirmed by recordings in mid-April.
The collapse of the comet was approximately 146 million km from Earth when Hubble captured it, and if any of it remains, it will be the closest to our planet, 116 million km, on May 23.
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