“NASA’s James Webb Telescope Captures Images of Water-Rich Comet in Inner Solar System”

Saturday, May 20, 2023 | 07:48 WIB

Surya Lesmana / LES

Houston, Beritasatu.com – The James Webb Telescope (JWST) recently captured images of frozen water on a near-Earth comet, and scientists are excited to collect them.

For the first time, the powerful telescope has spotted a water-rich comet in the inner solar system, NASA recently announced. The findings could help solve a longstanding mystery about how Earth gets its water, said a team of researchers in a study published May 15 in the journal Nature.

Nicknamed Comet Read, the object is surrounded by a halo of gas and dust. When JWST analyzed this halo using a special near-infrared instrument that detects heat, it found that the gas is composed mostly of water vapor, implying that the comet’s heart likely contained frozen water from the early solar system, potentially dating to 4.5 billion years ago. .

But oddly enough, the halo contains almost no carbon dioxide, the main ingredient of most comets known.

Comet Read is what is known as a main belt comet. This rare object is in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Like ordinary comets, comets are thought to contain ice composed of various elements. But unlike most comets, they are surrounded only by occasional halos and tails of gas.

Scientists have detected frozen water inside comets in distant solar systems, including in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud, which lies beyond the orbit of Neptune, several trillion miles from Earth. In this region, the heat from the sun is not strong enough to vaporize the volatile elements that give comets tails.

But the discovery of Comet Read confirms that water ice from the early solar system could have been preserved much closer to the sun, a fact astronomers had long predicted but never proven.

However, the missing carbon dioxide from comet Read presents an even bigger mystery. It could be that Read, for some reason, just formed without CO2. Or it’s possible that it had carbon dioxide early in its life but the volatile compound burned away over time in the sun’s heat.

“Being in the asteroid belt for a long time can cause it – carbon dioxide evaporates more easily than water ice, and can percolate for billions of years,” Michael Kelley, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and lead author of the study.

The discovery offers another clue in the quest to solve where Earth’s abundant water came from. Scientists have long theorized that the fall of an icy comet may have played a role in giving Earth its first liquid billions of years ago.

According to the researchers, the next step is to send a probe into the asteroid belt in hopes of collecting physical samples from comet Read and other similar main belt comets. This could help scientists figure out how water is distributed throughout star systems, laying the foundation for life as we know it.

# Comet# Comet findings# NASA’s Comet Findings# Komet Read

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