http://leapflash.blogspot.com/2015/10/comet-lovejoy-c2014-q2-on-february-22.html
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Comet Lovejoy (C/2014 Q2) on February 22, 2015. An international team of scientists has found more than twenty molecules in the comet, including ethyl alcohol and a simple sugar. Image credit: Fabrice Noel. |
“We found that Comet Lovejoy was releasing as much alcohol as in at least 500 bottles of wine every second during its peak activity,” explained lead author Dr Nicolas Biver, of the Paris Observatory in France.
Comet Lovejoy, also known as C/2014 Q2, was one of the brightest and most active comets since comet Hale-Bopp in 1997.
The comet was discovered in August 2014 and reached perihelion on January 30, 2015, when it was releasing water at the rate of 20 tons per second.
Using the 100-foot telescope of the Institut de Radioastronomie Millimétrique (IRAM), located on Pico Veleta in the Sierra Nevada, Spain, Dr Biver and his colleagues observed Lovejoy’s atmosphere between 13 and 26 January 2015, when the comet was the brightest and the most productive, at a distance of 0.6 AU from Earth and of 1.3 AU from the Sun.
“The result definitely promotes the idea the comets carry very complex chemistry,” said co-author Dr Stefanie Milam of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
Sunlight energizes molecules in the comet’s atmosphere, causing them to glow at specific microwave frequencies.
Each kind of molecule glows at specific, signature frequencies, allowing the scientists to identify it with detectors on IRAM’s telescope.
The advanced equipment was capable of analyzing a wide range of frequencies simultaneously, allowing the team to determine the types and amounts of many different molecules in the comet despite a short observation period.
Some scientists think that comet impacts on early Earth delivered a supply of organic molecules that could have assisted the origin of life. The discovery of complex organic molecules in Comet Lovejoy and other comets gives support to this hypothesis.
“The next step is to see if the organic material being found in comets came from the primordial cloud that formed the Solar System or if it was created later on, inside the protoplanetary disk that surrounded the young Sun,” said co-author Dr Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, an astronomer at the Paris Observatory.
