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by usaphp
3580 days ago
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From Wikipedia about the comet: "One of the most outstanding discoveries of the mission so far is the detection of large amounts of free molecular oxygen (O
2) gas surrounding the comet. Current solar system models suggest the molecular oxygen should have disappeared by the time 67P was created, about 4.6 billion years ago in a violent and hot process that would have caused the oxygen to react with hydrogen and form water. Molecular oxygen has never before been detected in cometary comas. In situ measurements indicate that the O
2/H
2O ratio is isotropic in the coma and does not change systematically with heliocentric distance, suggesting that primordial O
2 was incorporated into the nucleus during the comet's formation. Detection of molecular nitrogen (N
2) in the comet suggests that its cometary grains formed in low-temperature conditions below 30 K (−243.2 °C; −405.7 °F)." [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasime... |
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