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from the here-she-comes-did-I-just-assume-its-gender? dept.
Submitted via IRC for Bytram
Interstellar comet Borisov gets the close-up ghostly glamour shot it deserves
Interstellar comet 2l/Borisov is only the second known object to visit our solar system from the great wide universe beyond. (Oddball Oumuamua was the first.) It's no wonder we can't stop staring at it.
Yale astronomers snapped a new close-up image of the comet that gives one of the best looks yet at this cosmic stranger. The image comes from the W.M. Keck Observatory's Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer in Hawaii.
We're hitting prime viewing time for the comet, which will make its closet approach to Earth in December when it zips by at a spacious distance of 190 million miles (300 million kilometers) away.
Borisov is warming up as it gets closer to our sun. According to Yale, the center of the comet is roughly a mile in width, but its tail stretches out to nearly 100,000 miles (160,000 kilometers). The image shows this central mass as well as a fuzzy halo of gas and dust trailing behind it. The astronomers described it as "ghostly."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 28 2019, @12:57PM
FTFY
Last one was discovered by an amateur using a DIY telescope [wikipedia.org] (i.e not paid or enrolled in a dedicated program) and took 12 days worth of observations to decide it is extrasolar.
The first one was first observed after it passed the closest point to the Sun [wikipedia.org] (i.e. while leaving the Solar System).
We'd better start looking after dark matter black holes, they're tricksy.