In the pictures, a spectacular eruption of one of the strangest comets in the solar system

29b / Swazman Security Guard, Formerly known as Swazman-Watchman 1, is a comet From time to time The Solar System, Discovered November 15, 1927 Astronomers Germans Friedrich Karl Arnold Schwarzman and Arno Arthur Watchman in a laboratory in Hamburg, Germany. This comet is more precisely one Centurion The active centaur is a small body in the “area of ​​giants” Thursday And Neptune, And 29P in this case a Around the circular path Slightly weird (0.04) is located beyond Jupiter (6) Astronomical units For the comet, as opposed to the 5.2 astronomical units for the planet). Active, that means showing up sometimes Comet activity, I.e. a hair and / or a Sequence.

This comet, whose nucleus is about 60 kilometers in diameter, is unusual: in normal times, it orbits Size 16, but suddenly several times a year Explosions of process It brightens to 1 to 5 degrees in a few hours (i.e. 2.5 to 100 times brighter), before returning to it Brightness In the usual one or two weeks.

29P I have a phone Explosion of process In late September, the “shell” was surrounded by dust and then spread and scattered, as can be seen below Video posted by Terry Lovejoy on October 5th. This video shows the evolution of the comet between September 28 and October 5. In the last picture, the dust tile is about 200,000 kilometers in diameter, almost one and a half times the diameter of Jupiter.