What's up with the balancing rocks on this comet?
The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, the first probe to successfully orbit a comet, snapped a few pictures of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in August and September of 2014 that now have scientists puzzled. There appears to be a balancing rock formation, with a boulder measuring nearly 100 feet in diameter perched at the edge of a small depression in the comet’s terrain joined by two other rocks also casting shadows on the comet’s surface.
“How the potential balancing rock on the comet was formed is not clear at this point,” said Holger Sierks, principle investigator on Rosetta’s OSIRIS camera instrument, in a statement.
Similar geological formations on Earth are typically caused by glacier movements that left rocks behind balancing in unusual ways, but scientists think that the three rocks on Comet 67P may have rolled or otherwise moved from one part of the comet to another, stopping in unlikely positions.
Of course, this could all merely be an optical illusion, and researchers are still trying to determine whether or not that’s the case, according to Mashable; “Interpreting images of the comet’s surface can be tricky,” says Sierks.
“We had noticed this formation already in earlier images,” added Sebastien Besse, the OSIRIS scientist who discovered the possible balancing rock. “However, at first the boulders did not seem to differ substantially from other we had seen.”
The first image to suggest that this particular rock was special was a photograph taken by the spacecraft in August 2014, showing one rock seemingly standing up like a pillar. However, two more photos, taken in September 2014, couldn’t quite confirm this.
The Rosetta team intends to snap more pictures of this curious formation as Comet 67P continues its trip around the sun, and it will make its closest pass to the sun this August.
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Source: http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1113393637/whats-up-with-the-balancing-rocks-on-this-comet-051915/
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