[meteorite-list] Large, Distant Comets More Common Than Previously Thought

[Ron Baalke]

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?feature=6902

Large, Distant Comets More Common Than Previously Thought
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
July 25, 2017

Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the 
Sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their 
time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" 
will never approach the Sun in a person's lifetime. In fact, those that 
travel inward from the Oort Cloud -- a group of icy bodies beginning roughly 
186 billion miles (300 billion kilometers) away from the Sun -- can have 
periods of thousands or even millions of years.

NASA's WISE spacecraft, scanning the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, 
has delivered new insights about these distant wanderers. Scientists found 
that there are about seven times more long-period comets measuring at 
least 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across than had been predicted previously. 
They also found that long-period comets are on average up to twice as 
large as "Jupiter family comets," whose orbits are shaped by Jupiter's 
gravity and have periods of less than 20 years.

Researchers also observed that in eight months, three to five times as 
many long-period comets passed by the Sun than had been predicted. The 
findings are published in the Astronomical Journal.

"The number of comets speaks to the amount of material left over from 
the solar system's formation," said James Bauer, lead author of the study 
and now a research professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. 
"We now know that there are more relatively large chunks of ancient material 
coming from the Oort Cloud than we thought."

The Oort Cloud is too distant to be seen by current telescopes, but is 
thought to be a spherical distribution of small icy bodies at the outermost 
edge of the solar system. The density of comets within it is low, so the 
odds of comets colliding within it are rare. Long-period comets that WISE 
observed probably got kicked out of the Oort Cloud millions of years ago. 
The observations were carried out during the spacecraft's primary mission 
before it was renamed NEOWISE and reactivated to target near-Earth objects 
(NEOs).

"Our study is a rare look at objects perturbed out of the Oort Cloud," 
said Amy Mainzer, study co-author based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 
Pasadena, California, and principal investigator of the NEOWISE mission. 
"They are the most pristine examples of what the solar system was like 
when it formed."

Astronomers already had broader estimates of how many long-period and 
Jupiter family comets are in our solar system, but had no good way of 
measuring the sizes of long-period comets. That is because a comet has 
a "coma," a cloud of gas and dust that appears hazy in images and obscures 
the cometary nucleus. But by using the WISE data showing the infrared 
glow of this coma, scientists were able to "subtract" the coma from the 
overall comet and estimate the nucleus sizes of these comets. The data 
came from 2010 WISE observations of 95 Jupiter family comets and 56 long-period 
comets.

The results reinforce the idea that comets that pass by the Sun more often 
tend to be smaller than those spending much more time away from the Sun. 
That is because Jupiter family comets get more heat exposure, which causes 
volatile substances like water to sublimate and drag away other material 
from the comet's surface as well.

"Our results mean there's an evolutionary difference between Jupiter family 
and long-period comets," Bauer said.

The existence of so many more long-period comets than predicted suggests 
that more of them have likely impacted planets, delivering icy materials 
from the outer reaches of the solar system.

Researchers also found clustering in the orbits of the long-period comets 
they studied, suggesting there could have been larger bodies that broke 
apart to form these groups.

The results will be important for assessing the likelihood of comets impacting 
our solar system's planets, including Earth.

"Comets travel much faster than asteroids, and some of them are very big," 
Mainzer said. "Studies like this will help us define what kind of hazard 
long-period comets may pose."

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, managed and 
operated WISE for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The 
NEOWISE project is funded by the Near Earth Object Observation Program, 
now part of NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The spacecraft 
was put into hibernation mode in 2011 after twice scanning the entire 
sky, thereby completing its main objectives. In September 2013, WISE was 
reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA's 
efforts to identify potentially hazardous near-Earth objects.

For more information on WISE, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/wise

News Media Contact
Elizabeth Landau
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-6425
elizabeth.landau at jpl.nasa.gov

2017-197