Rosetta comet outburst
The OSIRIS wide-angle camera on the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe captured this view of an outburst from the Atum region on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko on Feb. 19. (Credit: ESA / Rosetta / MPS for OSIRIS Team, MPS / UPD / LAM / IAA / SSO / INTA / UPM / DASP / IDA)

The scientists behind the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission to a comet today released an amazing series of pictures showing the space mountain flashing with an outburst of dust and gas.

They suspect that the Feb. 19 outburst, captured by Rosetta’s instruments from a distance of about 20 miles, may have been triggered by a landslide.

“Over the last year, Rosetta has show that although activity can be prolonged, when it comes to outbursts, the timing is highly unpredictable, so catching an event like this was pure luck,” Matt Taylor, ESA’s Rosetta project scientist, said in a news release. “By happy coincidence, we were pointing the majority of instruments at the comet at this time, and having these simultaneous measurements provides us with the most complete set of data on an outburst ever collected.”

The readings were sent back soon after the eruption, but it took months to reconstruct the chain of events behind it. Now a research paper about the phenomenon has been published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“From Rosetta’s observations, we believe the outburst originated from a steep slope on the comet’s large lobe, in the Atum region” said lead author Eberhard Grün, a planetary scientist at Germany’s Max-Planck-Institute for Nuclear Physics.

The researchers say thermal stresses in the surface material probably triggered a landslide that exposed fresh water ice to direct sunlight. That ice immediately turned to gas, dragging the surrounding dust up with it to produce a bright debris cloud.

Rosetta was launched in 2004, made its rendezvous with Churyumov-Gerasimenko two years ago and sent a lander named Philae down to the surface in November 2014. The solar-powered lander sent back a few days’ worth of science data, but it’s now fallen silent forever. Last month, ESA turned off the only instrument that could communicate with Philae.

The Rosetta spacecraft, which is about the size of a washing machine with huge solar panels on each side, is due to meet its end on Sept. 30 when it’s intentionally sent down to the comet’s surface.

Grün and Taylor are among 96 authors of the research paper, titled “The 19 Feb. 2016 Outburst of Comet 67P/CG: An ESA Rosetta Multi-Instrument Study.”

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