Comets or also called centaurs, are objects that exist between the orbits of Saturn and Jupiter, and on November 23 Cai Stoddard-Jone took the photo above.
It is an exploding comet or getting a brutal eruption, the photo was taken from the Faulkes telescope in Hawaii, we see the ball or shell of gas and dust that has been released violently from the cryovolcanic Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann.
The volcanic thing is because it undergoes violent eruptions when its ice thaws, at the time of the photo the shell you are seeing was more than 100,000 kilometers in diameter and also had the shape of Pacman, the video game character, the comparison is funny, yes , but the shape indicates to astronomers that the eruption is not uniform, but rather that it comes from a point on the Comet, it could be a volcano or a crack.
The outburst occurred on November 22, the Comet suddenly brightened by more than four magnitudes, a sign that a large eruption was taking place and luckily all this happened very far from Earth, because this Comet is one of the giants, it is 60 kilometers in diameter and orbits between Jupiter and Saturn.
Comets are made up of different ices, of course they have water, but they also have other frozen substances that here on earth would be gases. It is believed that this Comet is vaporizing nitrogen and CO2 that would have been frozen, which prompted it to move from position it was in (believed to have formed in an area much further from the sun) and have moved to this new position between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn.
In this new position, the sun continues to vaporize those gases from the Comet and causing these outbursts that we see, this explosion is tremendous, we are talking about enormous distances, beyond the orbit of Jupiter, astronomers also believe that the Comet will continue to move due to the gravitational influence of Jupiter and that in about 10,000 years it will be trapped by its gravity, with a 65% possibility.
There are other possibilities, but let's hope that this is the one that occurs, that it is trapped by Jupiter's gravity or that, even if it is not that, within 10,000 years humanity will already have a planetary defense system to deflect giant asteroids like this one, because this giant Comet would be a total destroyer in an impact with the earth.
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