Many are sure to follow

Feb 12, 2010 08:03 GMT  ·  By

P/2010 B2 (WISE) is the name astronomers gave to the first comet that the new NASA WISE telescope has discovered. Launched only a few weeks ago, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has already found its first asteroid, and is expected to find several thousands of additional space rocks at it conducts its survey. It analyzes the skies with extremely sensitive infrared light detectors, and is expected to find numerous asteroids, comets, meteors, cold galaxies and stars, brown dwarves, and other such space structures. WISE will conduct its survey over the next few months, during which time it will survey the entire Universe one and a half times, Space reports.

The newly discovered celestial body is estimated to be very old. In a statement NASA made public, experts at the space agency say that it was most likely created about 4.5 billion years ago, about the same time when the Sun and the Earth appeared, several hundred million years apart. According to astronomers, it would appear that the comet WISE has spent a lot of time in the solar system, being kicked around by the gravitational pulls of the large gas giants. Eventually, after billions of years of wandering, it settled on an orbit that brings it a lot closer to the star.

“Comets are ancient reservoirs of water. They are one of the few places besides Earth in the inner solar system where water is known to exist. With WISE, we have a powerful tool to find new comets and learn more about the population as a whole. Water is necessary for life as we know it, and comets can tell us more about how much there is in our solar system,” says NEOWISE principal investigator, Amy Mainzer. The expert, who is based at the NASA jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), in Pasadena California, reveals that the name of the new project comes from combining the acronyms WISE, for the telescope, and NEO, which means near-Earth objects.

The goal is to discover and catalog as many comets and asteroids as possible. The newly found celestial body appears to be heading away from the Sun at this point, and is currently estimated to be around 175 million kilometers (109 million miles) away from Earth. "It is very unlikely that a comet will hit [our planet]. But, in the rare chance that one did, it could be dangerous. The new discoveries from WISE will give us more precise statistics about the probability of such an event, and how powerful an impact it might yield,” states JPL WISE project scientist James Bauer.