“atmosphere” – the tail gas – the Churiumov-Gerasimenko comet (or 67P) contains a high proportion of oxygen molecules, something which hitherto had never been observed in the comet. The results, which may require you to review the formation of theories in our solar system were published in the journal Nature dated Thursday.
Between September 2014 and March in 2015, an international team led by Andre Bieler, the University of Michigan (USA), took measurements of the comet’s atmosphere of gases with the mass spectrometer ROSINA, installed aboard the probe Ribbon the European Space Agency (ESA), in orbit around 67P. And these measurements revealed that molecular oxygen (O2) is the “fourth most common gas in the atmosphere of the comet, then water, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide,” he explains release the University of Bern (Switzerland), whose scientists participated in the study.
Comets are “witnesses” of the early solar system. And here, it was thought that molecular oxygen, which is highly reactive, had that remote point combined with hydrogen to form water. “We would never have imagined that oxygen could ‘survive’ for billions of years without combining with other substances,” says Katrhin Altwegg of the University of Berne and co-author of the paper, quoted in the same document.
If the oxygen molecules had not yet been detected in other comets, it is due to the difficulty of doing so from installed spectrometers on telescopes. It took measurements in situ the Ribbon for this to become possible, still reads the statement.
A more plausible explanation, say authors It is that the oxygen in the atmosphere 67P have formed very early even before the formation of the solar system. “These new findings, pointing to an old oxygen source [the comet] may discredit some of the theoretical models about the formation of the solar system,” says Altwegg.
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