Excellent follow up on 67P GP – what is this thing really made from? Comets were conjectured to be “dirty snowballs” but are they really? From looking at the photos, this comet looks far more rocky than icy.
What gives?
Below are two photos of comet 67P/Churyumov- Gerasimenko. The first is a close-up of the so called body, the second is a portion of the head. These two areas have numerous matching points showing that they were once joined together. It therefore follows that 67P/C-G was once a single body that has since been stretched, resulting in the two lobes we see today.
67P/C-G is therefore not a contact binary as has been suggested. Nor is it an unstretched single body that has been eroded to form the separate head and body.
As it’s clear the comet was stretched, it must have been subjected to one of two scenarios. It either underwent a close approach to Jupiter under the Roche limit in the distant past or it underwent spin-up to around a 90-120 minute rotation period which would overcome its gravitational pull. The former scenario would need to allow stretching…
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