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The Library Looks At Mysteries: A Comet

white and brown galaxy on black sky
Photo by Luis Felipe Alburquerque Briganti on Pexels.com

There are so many unusual, interesting, and new things you can find – if you just look around a little bit. And libraries are all about mysteries! So, we are looking at a real-life small mystery each week and bringing some library resources to help add some clarity and some thought.

Join us! Share with your library patrons! Start with our story, and build it for your own library! Or, just enjoy some small mysteries in your life.

Do you go outside at night and look up? Depending on how much light pollution is in your area, there are so many interesting things to see! It’s kind of humbling – our problems and our interests seem so important each day. But when you look up and see how incredibly vast, how huge the universe is around us, it can keep things in perspective. It’s good to have the perspective.

And there are visitors to our “neighborhood” here. I’m not talking about aliens; we can save that for another article. Instead I mean a comet. A beautifully pristine comet. And it came to visit our solar system. From where? How long has it been traveling?

You can get more information in the article Mysterious Interstellar Visitor May Be the Most Pristine Comet Ever Found.

“New observations with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) indicate that the rogue comet 2I/Borisov, which is only the second and most recently detected interstellar visitor to our Solar System, is one of the most pristine ever observed. Astronomers suspect that the comet most likely never passed close to a star, making it an undisturbed relic of the cloud of gas and dust it formed from.”

“The team found that 2I/Borisov has polarimetric properties distinct from those of Solar System comets, with the exception of Hale–Bopp. Comet Hale–Bopp received much public interest in the late 1990s as a result of being easily visible to the naked eye, and also because it was one of the most pristine comets astronomers had ever seen. Prior to its most recent passage, Hale–Bopp is thought to have passed by our Sun only once and had therefore barely been affected by solar wind and radiation. This means it was pristine, having a composition very similar to that of the cloud of gas and dust it — and the rest of the Solar System — formed from some 4.5 billion years ago.”

“They discovered that 2I/Borisov’s coma — an envelope of dust surrounding the main body of the comet — contains compact pebbles, grains about one millimeter in size or larger. In addition, they found that the relative amounts of carbon monoxide and water in the comet changed drastically as it neared the Sun. The team, which also includes Olivier Hainaut, says this indicates that the comet is made up of materials that formed in different places in its planetary system.

The observations by Yang and her team suggest that matter in 2I/Borisov’s planetary home was mixed from near its star to further out, perhaps because of the existence of giant planets, whose strong gravity stirs material in the system. Astronomers believe that a similar process occurred early in the life of our Solar System.”

Hmmmmm…..interesting.

This would be a good time to set up a display about your books on astronomy. Or, maybe organize a program – there are plenty of things to enjoy on some citizen science websites.

Here are a few books you might consider:

Think astronomical thoughts this week. Look up! Who knows what you might see? It’s a big universe out there.