Jul 29
Centaurs In Space May Be Comets, NASA Space Telescope Observations Suggest (VIDEO)
Posted in: Today's ChiliWhat exactly are space centaurs? For years, researchers have been debated whether those mysterious celestial bodies, which orbit the sun between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune, are asteroids or comets.
But new observations from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) suggest that most centaurs are comets.
“Our data point to a cometary origin for most of the objects, suggesting they are coming from deeper out in the solar system,” study author Dr. James Bauer, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said in a written statement. “Just like the mythical creatures, the centaur objects seem to have a double life.”
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