The Hubble quad scope has take note the furthest fighting inbound comet ever known , which is currently 2.4 billion kilometers ( 1.5 billion miles ) from Earth . The object , know as C/2017 K2 ( PANSTARRS ) or " K2 " , was discovered last May by the Pan - STARRS observatory in Hawaii .
K2 is already active . The observation reveal that although it ’s still far away from the Sun , it skylark an outgassing that stretches to 130,000 kilometers ( 80,000 international mile ) . The outgassing is called a coma and is made of gas and dust liberated from the karyon due to evaporation .
" K2 is so far from the Sun and so insensate , we live for sure that the activity – all the fuzzy stuff urinate it look like a comet – is not bring on , as in other comets , by the evaporation of water ice , " lead researcher David Jewitt of the University of California , Los Angeles , said in astatement . " alternatively , we think the activity is due to the sublimation [ a square changing directly into a gaseous state ] of superintendent - volatiles as K2 makes its maiden ingress into the solar organization ’s worldwide zone . That ’s why it ’s special . This comet is so far out and so unbelievably frigid that water ice there is freeze down like a rock . "
The comet comes from the profundity of outer space – the region beyond the orbit of Pluto , shout the Oort cloud , where the remnant debris of the early Solar System is located . K2 has been on a million - yr journey to arrive at us . It has a 19 - klick ( 12 - mile ) cell nucleus and the researchers consider it is coated in volatile substance like oxygen , nitrogen , C dioxide , and carbon monoxide . This composition is n’t too strange but it ’s intriguing to see the gun being expelled .
" I think these volatile are spread all through K2 , and in the start billions of long time ago , they were probably all through every comet soon in the Oort Cloud , " Jewitt added . " But the volatiles on the surface are the ones that absorb the heating plant from the Sun , so , in a sense , the comet is shedding its prohibited skin . Most comets are discovered much close to the Sun , near Jupiter ’s ambit , so by the time we see them , these surface volatiles have already been bake off . That ’s why I think K2 is the most rude comet we ’ve seen . "
As reported inThe Astrophysical Journal Letters , the team looked for past detections of the comet in archival data point and discovered that the Canada - France - Hawaii Telescope spotted K2 in 2013 . It was further than Uranus but so dim that no one discover it .
The comet will come nearer than the orbit of Mars by 2022 and once it gets this close it might even develop a stern .
