Many of the mythical creatures we know are unlikely to ever turn up in the real world, and that's probably for the best. However, a half-horse, half-human hybrid – a centaur, appears to have wiggled its way into the universe in the form of a whole new kind of astrophysical phenomenon.
Centaurs in the solar system are hybrids between asteroids and comets, and researchers have spotted one in the early days of its many-decade-long transformation into a comet.
The space rock was caught in action by astronomers using the ATLAS telescope in Hawaii in May 2020. Dubbed 'P/2019 LD2', the object's orbit seems to indicate to researchers that it falls under a class of rocky-icy asteroids with unstable orbits called 'Jupiter Trojans'. The Jupiter trojans, commonly called 'Trojan asteroids' or simply 'Trojans', are a huge band of asteroids that share the planet Jupiter's orbit around the Sun. P/2019 LD2, specifically, appears to have a composition that resembles both asteroid and comet, which could mean that it moves around in the solar system before making its way back out, giving astronomers a unique opportunity to study Trojans, and how comets form.
After crunching some numbers of the object's orbit and likely temperature over the past 3000 years, astronomers have found that P/2019 LD2 was a centaur even before it entered its current Jupiter Trojan-like orbit in 2018 July. After a brief warming up period, they expect that it will return to being a Centaur by 2028 February, before eventually becoming part of the Jupiter Trojan-family comet by 2063 February. In other words, the centaur is going to become a comet by February 2063, and possibly a bright one.
"We have an opportunity here to see the birth of a comet as it starts to become active," Kat Volk, says planetary scientist from the University of Arizona, Tucson, told Science News.
Researchers suspect that centaurs are the missing link between the icy, tiny space rocks at the edge of our solar system (called the Kuiper Belt) beyond Neptune, and the comets that frequently make their way towards the inner planets. These comets, also known as "short-period" comets, come from the sea of icy space rocks in the Kuiper Belt, orbit the sun once a decade or longer, and show up predictably in Earth’s skies, according to a Science News report. In contrast, there are also "long-period" comets that visit the inner solar system once a century or longer, which might originate from regions even farther away from the Sun, with orbits that carry them to the very edges of the solar system.
Astronomers think the space rock P/2019 LD2 is morphing from one kind of space rock to a whole other kind, with very different features. This presents an opportunity to watch a comet form in real time over decades to come, the study pre-published in arXiv, reads.
“What we really need to do is study many of these,” says lead author Henry Hsieh, a planetary astronomer at Planetary Science Institute but not involved in the study, is quoted as saying by Science News.
"Study this one first, and then study more of them, and figure out whether this object is an outlier or whether we see a consistent picture."
But we may not have to wait till 2063 to find out what happens to space rocks like P/2019 LD2. With new telescopes like the Vera Rubin Observatory going online in the decade to come, along will come more opportunity to watch these centaurs be born, transform, and interact with the solar system.
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