Humbling size of interstellar Comet Borisov revealed in latest look
Scott Sutherland
mercredi, 27 novembre 2019 à 18:30 - This visitor from another star is putting on quite a show for astronomers
Interstellar Comet Borisov is just a tiny dot in our night sky, visible only in the early morning hours before sunrise. Still, astronomers are capturing amazing new views of this visitor, using the very best telescopes available.
Since first spotted at the end of August, by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, our views of Comet C/2019 Q4 (Borisov), aka 2I/Borisov, have grown from a tiny smudge to this latest image. Taken using the Keck Telescope in Hawaii by Yale astronomers Pieter van Dokkum, Cheng-Han Hsieh, Shany Danieli and Gregory Laughlin, it is our best look at the comet, yet.
“It’s increasingly seeming that the solar system is something of an oddball,” said Gregory Laughlin, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “While it’s still too soon to know for sure how odd the solar system is, if it turns out to be a cosmological anomaly, then so might be Earth – and life.”
ESO’s VLT Captures a “Very Young Version of our Own Sun”
“This discovery is a snapshot of an environment that is very similar to our Solar System, but at a much earlier stage of its evolution,” says Alexander Bohn, at Leiden University in the Netherlands, about the image of a young, Sun-like star with multiple planets directly imaged located about 300 light-years away in the Southern constellation of Musca (The Fly) in July of 2020 by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT). Bohn’s team imaged this system during their search for young, giant planets around stars like our Sun but far younger. The sta