This comet suddenly started spinning backwards near the sun, and scientists don’t know why
Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák is a bit of an oddity as far as comets go. Another weirdo in the latest line of them, with the king of the weird-o-comets, 3I/ATLAS, recently proving that it’s not so much an alien artifact as it is just unusual.
As comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák raced toward the Sun, its rotation slowed from about 20 hours to 46 hours between March and May 2017. Then, according to astronomers, it appears to have stopped completely…and then flipped.
Comets seem to know that we are watching and performing tricks for our entertainment.
Scientists cannot figure out why this comet suddenly turned around near the sun
Seam New York Times reports, the comet’s silly pet tricks were served up by NASA’s Swift and later confirmed with images from the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomer David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles, analyzed the Hubble data and found that in December 2017, the comet was spinning once every 14 hours, but in the opposite direction.
Comets are remnant building blocks of the early solar system that apparently come to life as they melt as they approach the Sun. They shoot plumes of ice and gases that make them do all sorts of flips and tricks in space. Sometimes that ice thawing process acts as a thruster, creating jets that can shoot off the surface with enough force to change the comet’s spin.
These rotation changes are not unheard of. But what amazed scientists about Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák’s rotation was its scale. Comet spins typically change by minutes. This changed by dozens of hours, slowing to essentially zero before reversing course.
All of this leads scientists to believe that smaller comets are rarer than expected, with a theory suggesting that some may be spinning apart. They are accelerated by their own jets of gas until they snap, effectively blowing themselves to pieces because they are spinning too fast.
Astronomers will be keeping an eye on 41P as it swings back toward the sun in 2028. Especially with new studies coming back online via the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile. Spinning itself to death may just be how comets meet their demise. And if so, scientists want to make sure they observe as many of them as possible so they can watch them spiral to their deaths.
