A potentially ‘alien’ comet survives a close encounter with the Sun

Just before the bright green Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passes closest from Earth in 50,000 years, a bigger and stranger comet whizzed by the sun on Tuesday in an unusual encounter.

Most so-called “sun-grazing” comets are about the size of a house and eventually evaporate from their daring dive around our star, but comet 96P/Machholz is more like a city, 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) across . , and at least one astronomer suggests it may also be “alien.”

Not necessarily alien, as in created by an extraterrestrial intelligence, but rather an interstellar comet alien to our own solar system. If that’s the case, it could be very different from any other known comet, and all bets are off on how it will react to what appears to be a super close encounter with the sun.

“96P is one of the strangest comets in composition and behavior in the Solar System,” Carl Batams, who leads the US Naval Research Laboratory’s Sungrazer project, said on January 29. a tweet.

Battams has tracked 96P’s progress toward the sun using SOHO, NASA’s solar observatory, providing some pretty striking visuals. On Tuesday, he retweeted a time-lapse video of a 96P fan.

Most solar comets do not survive a close pass by the sun, but 96P is apparently large enough to do so. That said, Batams tracked what may be fragments that broke off from the core in the days leading up to the time of closest approach, or perihelion, on Tuesday.

The comet’s strange trajectory, which takes it so close to the sun, and its apparently low carbon levels are just some of the reasons researchers suggest it may be beyond the solar system. Only in recent years have astronomers documented the presence of interstellar comets visited our neighborhood, and at least one controversial astronomer speculated that an interstellar visitor they may have been artificial.

Batams tweeted that his project has launched a special program to observe 96P to collect as much data as possible.

“We’re trying to understand the hell out of science.”

Correction, 31 Jan: The perihelion date is fixed. It’s January 31st.