The idea that this little speck had been flying, frozen, for over 10 billion years, just to saunter on through our neighborhood, last year… makes the hairs on my arm… stand on end. It was already hurtling along, flung out of some likely distant, old and cold galaxy… about when ours was first congealing. Wow.
Here’s all that, summarizing a paper just published, in the journal Nature — from the US taxpayers’ Goddard | NASA’s JWST site:
…[JWST] captured detailed data, including chemical ratios of carbon and deuterium, also known as heavy hydrogen, that are not found in solar system comets. The results surprised researchers. Working backward, astronomers used the components that make up comet 3I/ATLAS to understand the environment in which it formed….
“This was a unique opportunity to study an ancient object from the distant galaxy, probably pre-dating our Sun and solar system,” said astro-chemist Martin Cordiner of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and lead author of the study. “On the one hand, we get direct insight into that distant time and place, and on the other, we learn something about how unusual our own solar system may be….”
[JWST’s] NIRSpec [instrument] revealed exceptionally high levels of deuterium, about 30 times more than seen in solar system comets. This implies that 3I/ATLAS may have originated in a very cold system much earlier in the history of our galaxy. During its formation, the material that became incorporated into 3I/ATLAS was likely exposed to plenty of radiation, but not any long-term warmth that would have reprocessed its “heavy water” ice, with deuterium, into the type of H2O ice we are familiar with on Earth….
[JWST’s] NIRSpec [instrument] showed only traces of carbon-13 compared to lighter-weight carbon-12. This also points to a very old origin for 3I/ATLAS, as stellar systems become enriched with carbon-13 over time as generations of stars are born and die in the galaxy. That is why there are higher levels of carbon-13 in our system, around our Sun, which formed relatively recently, 4.5 billion years ago….
That dirty snowball thus hails literally from a time (and a place) out of mind. From before when the disks that became Venus, Earth and Mars were just forming out of clouds of material. Amazing.
It came from a place [but perhaps not a time] we will never see — and a place likely no sentient being has ever… seen.
Onward, smiling — the isolation / altered states float was… excellent, this afternoon.
नमस्ते
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