Bright green comet found to contain 'abnormally high' levels of ALCOHOL dailymail.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from dailymail.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Visiting Comet 46P/Wirtanen Is Abnormally High in Alcohol
Comets are boozy beasts.
They come in here to the inner Solar System from goodness-knows-where (the outer Solar System), get a little warmth, and start spewing alcoholic compounds into space, willy-nilly.
Comet 46P/Wirtanen, which visited the inner Solar System in 2018, takes the martini. According to an analysis of its atmosphere, or coma, it was giving off what scientists have called an abnormally high amount of alcohol.
And this can tell us some really interesting things about the evolution of the Solar System. 46P/Wirtanen has one of the highest alcohol-to-aldehyde ratios measured in any comet to date, said cometary scientist Neil Dello Russo of Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. This tells us information about how carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen molecules were distributed in the early Solar System where Wirtanen formed.