It's more space news this week, as there's been a new study published about Comet 2I/Borisov, an interstellar object that passed through the solar system back in 2019. As if that wasn't unique enough, apparently this comet was completely pristine, in that it had never previously been affected by a star's heat. The scientists who conducted the research were able to determine this by studying the polarization of light emitted by the comet's coma, which was brighter than any other comet save for Comet Hale-Bopp . Hale-Bopp was quite the sight back in 1997, as I can personally attest, and it was also almost completely pristine, with scientists believing that it had only visited the Sun once.
While Hale-Bopp and 2I/Borisov were similarly bright, the polarization of 2I/Borisov was uniform while Hale-Bopp was not, indicating 2I/Borisov hadn't even had that one visit that its predecessor had. It's actually quite the stroke of luck, finding all this out; I can't imagine truly pristine objects come flying through the solar system on a regular basis. In fact, I'm willing to bet we don't see a truly fresh comet in our lifetime. Slightly depressing, but hey, cosmic time scales just work differently.
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