New Research Revealed Comets Could Split Apart

Breaking up is hard to do - at least for humans. It's a lot easier for comets, though. A new study led by Purdue University and the University of Colorado Boulder showed that bodies of some comets that orbit the sun in less than 200 years may split at some point, only to reunite sometime down the road.

Phys.org reported that previous research showed the nucleus of a comet can splinter apart - estimated to each of them splitting every 100 years or so. The team that was led by Purdue's postdoctoral fellow Masatoshi Hirabayashi and CU-Boulder Distinguished professor Daniel Scheeres, who studied several comets - primarily the rubber duck-shaped 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which showed two cracks, each the size of an American football field on the neck that connects its two large lobes.

This is not the only comet with two large lobes - prior studies, according to Space.com, suggested that five of the seven comet nuclei studied, including Halley's comet, are two-lobed, leading scientists to believe that if these comets spin fast enough - i.e., the 67P at 7 hours for rotation - the head and body would separate from each other.

The head and body aren't going to be able to escape from each other," Scheeres said. "They will begin orbiting each other, and in weeks, days or even hours they will come together again during a slow collision, creating a new comet nucleus configuration."

He also noted that the team's spin analysis predicted where the cracks on the comets will form, and led them to a new understanding as to how the comets may evolve over time. There are several factors that could cause the comets nuclei to spin slower or faster. According to eScienceNews.com for instance, flybys of the sun or Jupiter could cause them to spin up or spin down as they are affected by gravity of these large bodies.