Why the oxygen on a comet? – Rmf24.pl

The Rosetta probe discovered another surprising property of the comet 67P / Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It turns out that this cosmic pile of rubble emits gaseous oxygen in the free state. He writes about it in the latest issue of the journal “Nature”. The discovery is a surprise, suggests in fact that oxygen had to be built into the comet’s nucleus from the moment of its creation.

Rosetta explores the nucleus of Comet 67P about a year and was able to discover many issued from the surface of gases. The list even water vapor, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Found, many gases containing nitrogen, sulfur, or carbon and the noble gases. Oxygen is of course in the universe common, but extremely difficult to detect it in gaseous O2, because willingly reacts to form complex compounds. The discovery is all the more puzzling that so far in the shell of comets never recorded traces of oxygen. This time it is him so much that he had to appear in the nucleus of the comet at the stage of its formation.

We did not expect this, because I do not often happen discovery of free oxygen in interstellar space – says Kathrin Altwegg of the University of Bern, in charge of the team analyzing the spectrometer indicate ROSINA (Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis). The fact that he had to build up on the stage of the comet’s nucleus also difficult on the basis of current theory to explain the formation of the solar system – adds.

The amount of free oxygen was registered at any time strongly related to the amount of water vapor recorded, indicating that the origin and mechanism of release must be similar. The proportions of O2 and H2O did not change even as the comet approaches the Sun, when overall activity and amount of all substances emitted soared. It was suggested that oxygen does not occur on a regular basis, under the influence of solar wind particles and UV radiation, but was present inside the comet’s nucleus before. Analysis of the processes that allowed “protect” it from disintegration and reactions with other elements can yield interesting information on the evolution of the whole Solar System.