Rosetta’s comet may be bleeding oxygen that’s as old as the Sunday.
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Oxygen is billowing out of a comet racing through our solar system, and it has surprised scientists. This is only a theory that will need further investigation to be deemed true or not, but since this discovery has been mad it is clear that the appropriate attention will be given to it so that we might discover more about our solar system, or even the universe itself.
One suggestion is that gaseous molecular oxygen dissolved into icy granules which became part of the comet, but that hypothesis seems unlikely, since such gas is rare in our solar system, and would’ve been converted into water.
While we did find find out that a comet spits oxygen in space, there is little proof that others might be doing the exact same thing. Present solar system models have suggested that the molecular oxygen should have disappeared by the time creation of 67P has taken place, about 4.6 billion years ago.
Professor Kathrin Altwegg, project leader for Rosetta’s Rosina mass spectrometer instrument, said: “We had never thought that oxygen could “survive” for billions of years without combining with other substances”.
Oxygen is now known to have predated formation of the solar system. Rather, they are continually emitted by the comet as it is heated by the Sunday. According to the paper, “models of gas grain chemistry in molecular clouds predict O2/H2O ratios at least an order of magnitude lower”, meaning the amount of oxygen measured was about 10 times what was predicted.
It’s possible that oxygen originated very early-before the formation of the solar system.
Meanwhile, the scientists said they are trying to find molecular oxygen in the 1986 Giotto spacecraft observations of Halley’s Comet, the only other comet to get a close-up visit from a spacecraft.
While molecular oxygen has been found in Jupiter and Saturn, it’s never been found on a comet.
Oxygen is hard to detect with Earth-bound telescopes.
This would be a new era of discovery and may throw up a new class of exoplanet – exoplanets that not only orbit within their stars’ habitable zones, exoplanets that not only are small and (probably) rocky, but exoplanets that possess water and exoplanets that possess biosignatures.
Scientists not involved in this study underlined its importance, but said more time was needed to assess the implications.
“But we shouldn’t jump to conclusions”, he cautioned.
The Rosetta probe, now studying comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, has made a curious discovery – the ancient space debris is spewing oxygen into space.
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Needless to say, more work needs to be done, and we need to understand whether Rosetta’s data is unique to 67P/C-G or whether more comets contain similar quantities of elements and molecules that are often associated with life.
