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Inside Rosetta’s comet


Waspie_Dwarf

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Inside Rosetta’s comet

4 February 2016 There are no large caverns inside Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. ESA’s Rosetta mission has made measurements that clearly demonstrate this, solving a long-standing mystery.

Comets are the icy remnants left over from the formation of the planets 4.6 billion years ago. A total of eight comets have now been visited by spacecraft and, thanks to these missions, we have built up a picture of the basic properties of these cosmic time capsules. While some questions have been answered, others have been raised.

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Okay, so as the article says, the comet is homogenous - it has much the same low density throughout, rather than caverns surrounded by higher density ice. And that density is around half that of water.

That suggests to me that the comet must have accreted by fairly low speed impacts, such as must have happened in the earliest stages of the formation of the Solar System - in other words, before some objects became large enough that their gravity drew other objects in at speeds that would have crushed or vapourised them on impact. (Yes, I'm sure this is well known to experts in the field.) It just remains awe-inspiring to me that these objects may well be fossils from the earliest days of the Solar System.

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