Abnormally High Alcohol, Detected on Comet Wirtanen

  Abnormally High Alcohol, Mystery Heat Source Detected on Comet Wirtanen Comet 46P/Wirtanen was releasing an unusual amount of alcohol as it made its historic flyby of Earth two and a half years ago. That’s one of the findings from the latest published study comet detectives conducted after observing 46P/Wirtanen with W. M. Keck Observatory on Maunakea in Hawaii. “46P/Wirtanen has one of the highest alcohol-to-aldehyde ratios measured in any comet to date,” said Neil Dello Russo, a cometary scientist at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and co-author of the study. “This tells us information about how carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen molecules were distributed in the early solar system where Wirtanen formed.” Keck Observatory data also revealed a strange characteristic. Normally, as comets orbit closer to the Sun, the frozen particles in their nucleus heat up, then boil off, or sublimate, going directly from solid ice to gas, skipping the liquid phase. This process, cal