Credit: NASA, ESA, and D. Jewitt (University of California, Los Angeles)

No one knows where it came from. No one knows how long it has been drifting through the empty, cold abyss of interstellar space. But this year an object called comet 2I/Borisov came in from the cold. It was detected falling toward our Sun by a Crimean amateur astronomer. This emissary from the black unknown captured the attention of worldwide astronomers who aimed all kinds of telescopes at it to watch the comet sprout a dust tail. The far visitor is only the second known object to enter our solar system coming from elsewhere in the galaxy, based on its trajectory. Like a race track photographer trying to capture a speeding derby horse, Hubble took a series of snapshots as the comet streaked along at 110,000 miles per hour. Hubble provided the sharpest image ever of the fleeting comet, revealing a central concentration of dust around an unseen solid icy nucleus. The comet was 260 million miles from Earth when Hubble took the photo.In 2017, the first identified interstellar visitor, an object dubbed 'Oumuamua, swung within 24 million miles of the Sun before racing out of the solar system. Unlike comet 2I/Borisov, 'Oumuamua still defies any simple categorization. It did not behave like a comet, and it has a variety of unusual characteristics. Comet 2I/Borisov looks a lot like the traditional comets found inside our solar system, which sublimate ices, and casts off dust as they are warmed by the Sun. The wandering comet provides invaluable clues to the chemical composition, structure, and dust characteristics of a planetary building block presumably forged in an alien star system.

Provider: Space Telescope Science Institute

Image Source: https://hubblesite.org/contents/news-releases/2019/news-2019-53

Curator: STScI, Baltimore, MD, USA

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