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NASA’s telescope sheds light on mysterious celestial object: “It doesn’t look like anything”

byadmin
December 28, 2024

NASA’s James Webb Telescope has examined a celestial body with unprecedented strangeness, bearing the characteristics of both an asteroid and a comet.

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is revealing the secrets of the celestial body called 2060 Chiron, which has long attracted the attention of the scientific world and has features of both an asteroid and a comet.
Discovered in 1977 and classified as a “centaur”, 2060 Chiron resembles both an asteroid and a comet with its ice and rock structure. Centaurs, which took their name from the half-human, half-horse creatures in Greek mythology, are known as celestial bodies that formed in the distant and cold regions of the Solar System and moved towards the inner parts over time.
Scientists think that as the centaurs approached the Sun, the ice on their surfaces sublimated, creating a halo of gas, or coma, around them. However, Chiron has a much more complex structure than other members of the centaur family.
Charles Schambeau from the University of Central Florida emphasizes that Chiron is out of the ordinary.
Observations made with NASA’s James Webb Telescope revealed that the ices on Chiron’s surface are of a type never seen on any centaur before.
The team detected molecules such as water ice, ethane and propane on a centaur for the first time. Researchers think that these molecules were formed as a result of sunlight interacting with methane and water on the surface. It is estimated that basic compounds such as water and carbon dioxide were included in Chiron’s structure 4.5 billion years ago, during the early period of the Solar System. Noemi Pinilla-Alonso, one of the authors of the article, states that centaurs have not changed much over time.
Chiron, which is expected to approach the Sun over the next 20 years, will become brighter and provide scientists with much more detailed observations. This process may answer why centaurs exhibit different behaviors and many unanswered questions about the Solar System’s past.
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