James Webb Space Telescope Discovers Ancient Gas Plume from Distant Centaur, Unveiling Secrets of Solar System Formation

Liputan6.com, Jakarta – The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) captured a plume of gas originating from a distant comet-like object named Centaur. Scientists say that this number is an explosion of primordial gas that came out of the birth of the solar system.

Launching the Living Science page on Thursday (11/10/2024), this phenomenon provides clues about how centaurs are created, what makes them up, and how they move they eventually become full-fledged comets. Centaurs once lived in the icy Kuiper belt outside Neptune’s orbit.

However, a stressful interaction with Neptune pushed some of the Canaurs further inward. They orbit the sun between Jupiter and Neptune.

There, the centaurs are under the influence of Jupiter’s orbit which can pull some Centaurs closer to the sun. This turns them into short-lived comets that orbit our star in less than 200 years.

In a study published in the journal Nature, Centaurs can be considered the remnants of the formation of planetary systems. More than 500 centaurs have been discovered, but astronomers believe there could be as many as 10 million Centaurs out there.

One of the most prominent Centaurs is 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann.

Previous observations with radio waves have shown that jets of carbon monoxide gas point to the Sun, but the JWST Near-Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec) reveals much more. NIRSpec revealed a second burst of carbon monoxide (CO) originating from 29P and heading north.

The study also found two never-before-seen carbon dioxide (CO2) jets, heading north and south. The cause of this gas release cannot be determined.

In normal comets, jets of gas form when water ice warms under the sun’s heat, evaporates, and bursts through the surface to form a cometary tail and carry these gases with it. However, JWST found no evidence of water vapor in the plume.

This did not surprise the researchers, as 29P is too far from the Sun for water ice to sink. The details of the explosion reveal the surprising conclusion that 29P is not a single object, but several objects connected together.

These objects are called “contact binaries”, and astronomers are discovering more and more of them. For example, Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko visited by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission is a communication fate.

So did Arrokoth, a distant Kuiper Belt object discovered by the New Horizons spacecraft in 2019. Centaur 29P was too far away for even JWST to unravel its nucleus.

But 3D computer modeling of the origin of the gas jet shows that the jet came from different places and that different parts of 29P are made of different materials.