The Hubble Space Telescope has captured the best pictures yet of our newest interstellar visitor.
This comet from outside our solar system is zooming by us at a blistering 110,000 mph (177,000 kph). Hubble caught some glam shots over the weekend from a distance of 260 million miles (420 million kilometers). The photos were released Wednesday.
The comet 2I/Borisov as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope. image credit; AP
It’s the second known interstellar visitor to swoop through our solar system. An amateur astronomer from Crimea, Gennady Borisov, discovered the comet in August, two years after the first alien guest, a cigar-shaped rock known as Oumuamua, popped up.
“It’s a puzzle why these two are so different,” David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, who led the Hubble observation team, said in a statement.
On the other hand, it’s “very remarkable” that the comet’s properties appear to be similar to those of our own solar system’s building blocks, said Amaya Moro-Martin of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.
Polish astronomers using ground telescopes, meanwhile, have reported the comet — called Comet 2I/Borisov — looks to be reddish with a nucleus about 1 mile (2 kilometers) across.
The comet will make its closest approach to the sun in December and reach Jupiter’s distance by mid-2020, before heading back toward interstellar space. Hubble — along with other telescopes — will be on the lookout into next year.