The celestial object is one of the most distant 'active' comets ever discovered.
"It's kind of like being able to touch something from the beginning of the solar system," David Jewitt, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, toldThe mysterious comet was first discovered by the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System in Hawaii in May 2017, and e
Researchers speculate that K2 must have been active for several years when that first image was taken as backward modeling indicates that the comet was already venturing through space and oozing gas some 35 AU from the sun. AU refers to the Earth's average distance from the sun: one AU measures about 93 million miles .
"At 35 AU from the sun, temperature is probably something like 40 degrees above absolute zero," Jewitt said."So we know that water is as solid as rock there. It couldn't be responsible for the activity that we saw at those large distances."Despite its mysterious nature, Jewett believes that many comets must behave like K2; we just have not had the luxury of observing them.
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