What Happened to Comet Holmes?
One year after Comet 17P/Holmes shocked onlookers by exploding in the night sky, researchers are beginning to understand what happened.
We believe that a cavern full of ice, located as much as 100 meters beneath the crust of the comet’s nucleus, underwent a change of phase, says Bill Reach of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology. Amorphous ice turned into crystalline ice and, in the transition, released enough heat to cause Holmes to blow its top.
Anyone watching the sky in October 2007 will remember how the comet brightened a million-fold to naked-eye visibility. It looked more like a planet than a comet—strangely spherical and utterly lacking a tail. By November 2007, the expanding dust cloud was larger than Jupiter itself, and people were noticing it from brightly-lit cities.
Knowing that infrared telescopes are particularly sensitive to the warm glow of comet dust, Reach and colleague Jeremie Vaubaillon, also of Caltech, applied for observing time on the Spitzer Space Telescope—and they got it. We used Spitzer to observe Comet Holmes in November and again in February and March 2008, says Reach.
The infrared glow of the expanding dust cloud told the investigators how much mass was involved and how fast the material was moving. The energy of the blast was about 1014 joules and the total mass was of order 1010 kg. In other words, Holmes exploded like 24 kilotons of TNT and ejected 10 million metric tons of dust and gas into space.
These astonishing numbers are best explained by a subterranean cavern of phase-changing ice, Reach believes. “The mass and energy are in the right ballpark,” he says, and it also explains why Comet Holmes is a repeat exploder.
Another explosion was observed in 1892. It was a lesser blast than the 2007 event, but enough to attract the attention of American astronomer Edwin Holmes, who discovered the comet when it suddenly brightened. Two explosions (1892, 2007) would require two caverns. That’s no problem because comets are notoriously porous and lumpy. In fact, there are probably more than two caverns, which would mean Comet Holmes is poised to explode again.
When?
The astronomer who can answer that question will be famous! laughs Vaubaillon.
No one knows what triggered the phase change, says Reach. He speculates that maybe a comet-quake sent seismic waves echoing through the comet’s caverns, compressing the ice and changing its form. Or a meteoroid might have penetrated the comet’s crust and set events in motion that way. It’s still a mystery.
But not as much as it used to be.
See more Spitzer images of comets and other heavenly objects at www.spitzer.caltech.edu. Kids and grownups can challenge their spatial reasoning powers by solving Spitzer infrared Slyder puzzles.
This article was provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration