Comet Mission Reveals "Missing Link" in our Understanding of Planet Formation

The missing link in our understanding of planet formation has been revealed by the first ever spacecraft to orbit and land on a comet, say German scientists. The study is published in a recent edition of the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

A research team led by Jürgen Blum (Technische Universität Braunschweig, Germany) have analysed data from the historic Rosetta mission to uncover how comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, or “Chury” for short, came into existence more than four and a half billion years ago.

Understanding the evolution of our solar system and its planets was one of the main objectives of the Rosetta mission to comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. For Jürgen Blum and his international team it was worth it, because results from the various Rosetta and Philae instruments have revealed that only one out of many proposed models can explain their observations. Comet 67P consists of ‘dust pebbles’ ranging between millimetres and centimetres in size.

This is a schematic representation of the porous surface structure of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Based on the results of the Rosetta mission, Blum and colleagues conclude that comet 67P is composed of millimetre-sized dust pebbles. It is assumed that the pebbles inside the comet consist of a mixture of dust and ice (light blue spheres in the image) and only the uppermost layers, which are exposed to direct sunlight, do not contain ice (dark grey spheres).

Credit: Maya Krause, TU Braunschweig.

Contacts and sources:
Stephan Nachtigall, Technische Universität Braunschweig
 Dr Alyssa Drake, Royal Astronomical Societ

Citation: “Evidence for the formation of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko through gravitational collapse of a bound clump of pebbles“, Jürgen Blum et al., Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, in press.