Centaur, an icy body in space, is shooting multiple jets of hot gas. What's going on?

An icy body in the outer solar system is spewing hot gas and has baffled scientists for years. Centaur 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 was discovered in 1927 and undergoes highly active and quasi-periodical outbursts every six to eight weeks.

Now the James Webb Telescope has revealed fascinating details about the icy body. Using its near-infrared spectrograph instrument, a team of scientists mapped the gases it throws out. They found what it was spewing were two jets of carbon dioxide and a new jet of carbon monoxide pointed towards the Sun.

The findings were presented in a recent study published in Nature.

Add WION as a Preferred Source

The discovery of the gases gives scientists an insight into how the centaur originated. Not only this but it is also expected to help them understand more about the formation of the solar system.

Experts think that the centaur might not be one whole piece but a combination of multiple pieces.

“The fact that Centaur 29P has such dramatic differences in the abundance of [carbon monoxide] and [carbon dioxide] across its surface suggests that 29P may be made of several pieces,” Geronimo Villanueva, co-author of the study at NASA Goddard, said in a statement.

Also Read:Mission to probe 'crime scene' on Dimorphos ready for blast off

“Maybe two pieces coalesced together and made this centaur, which is a mixture between very different bodies that underwent separate formation pathways. It challenges our ideas about how primordial objects are created and stored in the Kuiper Belt.”

Centaurs fall somewhere between comets and asteroids. They possess the characteristics of both space bodies. They are icy and at one time used to orbit the Sun from beyond Neptune. However, giant planets have been casting gravitational influence on them, leading centaurs to slowly change their orbits.

They are now found between Jupiter and Neptune, although they are still similar to Trans-Neptunian objects, those cosmic bodies that lie beyond Neptune, and short-period comets.

"Centaurs can be considered as some of the leftovers of our planetary system’s formation," Sara Faggi, a researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, and lead author of the study, said in a statement.

Using Webb's data, the team created a model of the jets and found thatthe gases were being released from different regions on the centaur’s nucleus.