Sometimes astronomical events also become very surprising. In a rare case, scientists have seen a very strange activity in our solar system. They saw that a comet was passing near a planet, but both of them had a kind of encounter. The result was something that was rarely seen till now. Saturn did something amazing by pushing the comet out of the solar system.
The comet named A117uUD was discovered by the Terrestrial Impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) on June 14, 2024. Researchers took the help of 142 observations of the comet and were able to understand its orbit around the Sun. They found that comet A117uUD had a close encounter with Saturn in 2022 which changed the comet’s orbit.
This encounter between the planet and the comet put the comet into a highly oblate or elliptical orbit, throwing it into interstellar space, away from the Sun’s influence. The team used models to predict the path of A117uUD and found that the comet would leave the Solar System, flying at a speed of about 10,800 km/h.
Such incidents have been seen rarely, yet scientists are saying that this must be happening again and again. (Photo: Instagram/ saao_astro)
In comparison, this speed is about four and a half times the top speed of a Lockheed Martin F-16 jet fighter. This is the second time a comet has been seen on the verge of exiting the solar system. The first comet seen was C/1980 E1 (Bowell), which came on the escape path of the solar system after colliding with Jupiter on December 9, 1980.
“Our results indicate that the case of comet A117uUD is similar to that of C/1980 E1 (Bowell), suggesting that A117uUD may not have formed outside the Solar System. The fact that two ejections after planetary collisions were observed in less than 45 years indicates that such events are relatively frequent,” the team of researchers wrote in a paper published in the AAS journal Research Notes.
Earlier scientists were not in a position to say clearly whether A117uUD was a body from our own solar system or not. When the team involved in this discovery first analyzed the icy space rock, they felt that its orbit suggested that it was probably one of those who intruded into our solar system.
Tags: Amazing news, Bizarre news, OMG News, Weird news
FIRST PUBLISHED : August 4, 2024, 19:57 IST
