A newly discovered comet is likely a visitor from outside the solar system

The newly discovered comet C/2019Q4 Borisov excited the astronomical community this week because it appears to have originated outside the solar system. Official confirmation that Comet C / 2019 Q4 is an interstellar comet has yet to be obtained, but if it is, it is only the second object of its kind discovered so far after Umoamua in 2016.

A newly discovered comet has excited the astronomical community this week because it appears to have originated outside the solar system. The object – C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) – was discovered on August 30, 2019, by Gennady Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnitz, Crimea. Official confirmation that Comet C / 2019 Q4 is an interstellar comet has yet to be given, but if it is an interstellar guest it would be the second object of its kind ever discovered – the first being 'Oumuamua, which was observed and confirmed in October 2017.

The new comet, C / 2019 Q4, is still making its way towards the Sun, but it will remain further from the orbit of Mars and will not come closer to Earth than about 300 million km.

After the initial discovery of the comet, the automatic alert system at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California marked the object as interstellar. David Fernuccia, of NASA's Small Object Research Center at JPL, worked with astronomers at the European Space Agency's Coordination Center in Percati, Italy, to conduct additional observations. He then collaborated with the NASA-sponsored National Small Object Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to evaluate the comet's orbit and to determine whether it originated in our own solar system or elsewhere in the galaxy.

The comet is currently about 400 million km miles from the Sun and will reach its closest point - the perihelion, on December 8, 2019, at a distance of about 300 million km.

Fernuccia said: "The current speed of the comet is high, about 150,000 km/h, which is much higher than the typical speed of comets orbiting the Sun at the same distance." "The high speed indicates not only that the origin of the object is outside our solar system, but also that it left the solar system and will return to interstellar space."

coming from above

As mentioned, the comet is heading towards the inner solar system and it will enter it on October 26 from above at an angle of about 40 degrees relative to the Melaka plane, the plane where the Earth and the other planets orbit the Sun.
The fuzzy appearance of C/2019 Q4 suggests that the object has a central icy body that produces a surrounding cloud of dust and particles as it approaches the Sun and heats up. Its position in the sky (as seen from Earth) places it near the Sun—a region of the sky not typically examined by large ground-based asteroid surveys or NASA's NEOWISE spacecraft used to detect comets.

It will be possible to observe C / 2019 Q4 using professional telescopes for many months. "The object will reach its peak brightness in mid-December and will continue to be viewable with medium-sized telescopes until April 2020," Fernuccia said. "Then it will only be viewable with larger professional telescopes until October 2020."

Observations conducted by Karen May and her team at the University of Hawaii indicate the comet's nucleus is between 2 and 6 km in diameter. Astronomers will continue to collect observations to further characterize the comet's physical properties (size, rotation, etc.) and also to better calculate its orbit.

As mentioned, a study by two Israeli astronomers from Harvard University stirred up the world of astronomy, according to which it is possible that the asteroid Umuamoa, which looks like a kind of elongated reddish cigar and is about 400 meters long, was sent by an "alien culture". The two Prof. Avi Leib and Shmuel Biali put forward the hypothesis that it is possible that these are aliens looking for life elsewhere.
In December 2016, not long after its discovery, signals were sent to the asteroid in the hope that it might provide evidence for the existence of extraterrestrial life, but much to the disappointment of conspiracy enthusiasts, it became clear even then that the visitor from another planet was "just" an interstellar asteroid, with no signs of life. .

For a message on the NASA website

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• The cigar-shaped object that arrived outside the solar system is an extinct comet, not an asteroid or an alien spacecraft
• The seeds of the planets came from other solar systems
• My life as a comet hunter