You ’d never know from all thehigh - contrastphotographsof Comet 67P / Churyumov - Gerasimenko that the comet is actually quite black . This latterly released composite prototype reveals how petty lighting there is emanating from 67P / C - G , relative to other objects in our solar system .
https://gizmodo.com/check-out-this-spectacular-hi-res-shot-of-a-boulder-res-1644401279
https://gizmodo.com/the-landing-site-on-comet-churymov-gerasimenko-has-been-1634786155
The composite image was include in a recent office about albedo ( the term astronomers use to describe the coefficient of reflection of an object ) at ESA ’s Rosetta Blog . It ’s notnone - more opprobrious , but 67P / C - G is reasonably bloody coloured :
one way of giving at least a prompting of just how gloomy comets are is to show 67P / ascorbic acid - deoxyguanosine monophosphate against a number of other Solar System object expose a encompassing chain of mountains of albedo .
The collage below compares 67P / C - K with the Moon , the Earth , and Enceladus , a moon of Saturn . The brightness of each object in the montage has been scale according to its mingy albedo : for 67P / C - G , we have taken an albedo of 5 % ; for the Moon , 12 % ; for Earth , 31 % ( with deserts have an reflective power of roughly 40 % , thin clouds 30–50 % , thick clouds 60–90 % , and sea 7–10 % ) . Finally , for simplicity , an albedo of 100 % has been taken for the brightest part of the ice - covered surface of Enceladus , the most reflective body in the Solar System .
It ’s hard to do this scientifically accurately , part because the literal albedo in a give double of an aim depend on a whole host of factors and because the human eye and nous do n’t answer linearly to unlike brightness level levels . But hopefully this equivalence gives at least an effect of quite how dark 67P / C - G is and how diverse the Solar System ’s torso can be .
Morehere .
AstronomyScienceSpace
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