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September 17, 2019 08:10 pm

Comet Visitor From Outside Our Solar System Will Wow Scientists For Months

Astronomers have almost certainly detected a second interstellar comet zooming through our Solar System, but there's still quite a lot of work to be done to find out more about this alien space rock. In the weeks and months to come, astronomers will continue to observe this visitor with as many ground and space-based telescopes as possible to determine if it is, indeed, interstellar and figure out where it came from. From a report: An amateur astronomer, Gennady Borisov, first spotted this object on August 30th with his own telescope in Crimea. At the time, it wasn't immediately clear that the object -- named C/2019 Q4 -- wasn't from around here. As time has passed and more people looked at this thing, they've realized that the path that C/2019 Q4 is on does not loop around the Sun. Additionally, it's going super fast: about 93,000 miles per hour (150,000 kilometers per hour), which is faster than any object from the outer fringes of our neighborhood would be traveling. As NASA and an international team of experts announced last week, the signs all point to it passing through our Solar System on its way from some distant origin. The astronomy community hasn't officially confirmed that C/2019 Q4 is interstellar yet, though everyone is nearly certain about its status. "After getting enough data, I suspect we'll be assigning a permanent designation to say this object is interstellar," Davide Farnocchia, who is studying the comet at NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at JPL, tells The Verge. "But basically, there's no doubt from the trajectory that it is interstellar." The good news is that if this comet is truly from outside our Solar System, we caught it at a great time -- when it was moving on its way in toward us, rather than on its way out. That means astronomers will have more than a year to continue observing this thing, allowing them to potentially refine its trajectory or even tell us what this mysterious rock is made of.

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