Strange behavior of a comet

To begin with, comet 12P/Pons-Brooks does not pose any danger to the Earth, the closest it will be to our planet will be on June 2, 2024, passing 230 million kilometers from us, that is four times the minimum distance that separates it. The Earth of Mars is not a new comet either, it was discovered more than 200 years ago from the Marseille observatory, it was discovered in July 1812 by Jean Luis Pons.

What makes this comet special is that it is one of the largest to approach the sun, since it is about 30 km in diameter and it is also one of the brightest. This is because it is very active, it suffers numerous eruptions and explosions when it vaporizes. violently the different ices it has, the plural ice thing is very important because comets are not just balls of water ice, they have many other elements and frozen gases that vaporize when approaching the sun and they do so at different temperatures and at different times.

These vaporizations can cause, for example, that the Comet may have a crust of water ice, but inside it contains frozen gases that vaporize before the water ice, which causes them to violently come out to the outside through jets, this comet Being large, it is suspected that it has cryovolcanoes that would be like terrestrial volcanoes but instead of molten rock what they expel is ice and gases.

In recent months, the Comet suffered eruptions whose jets formed two quite impressive tails, which made some compare the appearance of the Comet with Han Solo's ship, The Millennium Falcon or also with the Enterprise and the sensational media said that they were like horns. Hell, you already know that for the press, terror is much more profitable than scientific reporting.

Up to this point, what happened is not a surprise for astronomers, it is certainly a spectacular sight, but it falls within what has already been seen in other comets. Now what the Comet did on November 14 is certainly out of the ordinary, because the explosion that it suffered that day and the expulsion of gases transformed it into a Pearl green sphere, with a dark stripe inside, the green color can be explained by the existence within the Comet of some frozen compound, perhaps cyanogen, which is a compound poisonous carbon and that has already been seen giving green tones to other comets.

The dark stripe is very strange, according to experts, it could be the shadow cast by a huge jet of gas and ice fragments that come out from a volcano or from a vent on the surface and this tells us that while the Comet's crust remains solid, there are areas of its interior composed of other materials that are vaporizing. What is going to happen when this comet gets closer to the sun? The explosions will break the crust, launching large fragments. The comet will break up completely. It would not be the first. time a large comet measuring tens of kilometers fragments, creating new comets several kilometers wide.

We have an example of this in the Kreutz sun rays, which are a group of about 4,000 comets ranging from a few tens of meters to several kilometers in diameter. As their name indicates, they graze the sun, passing very close to it. In fact, the smallest ones end up disintegrating, it is believed that all of them are fragments of a giant comet whose estimates according to researchers range from 50 km to 120 km in diameter and whose passage very close to the Sun and its breakup was recorded by the ancient Greeks ago. about 2370 years.

Astronomers wonder what will happen to comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, since Even if it breaks up, the normal thing is that the fragments follow the same trajectory that the Comet has circling the sun, so they would never pass near us. They would never be a danger to the Earth. They would always be very close, tens of millions of kilometers from us, but that would be normal and as I said at the beginning this is not a normal comet so the most cautious thing is to be attentive to what happens with this strange comet.

Thank you for visiting my blog. If you like posts about #science, #planet, #politics, #rights #crypto, #traveling and discovering secrets and beauties of the #universe, feel free to Follow me as these are the topics I write about the most. Have a wonderful day and stay on this great platform :) :)

! The truth will set us free and science is the one that is closest to the truth!