https://phys.org/ en-us Phys.org internet news portal provides the latest news on science including: Physics, Nanotechnology, Life Sciences, Space Science, Earth Science, Environment, Health and Medicine. Halley's Comet captures the imagination in a way that few other astronomical objects do. When it last made its approach toward the sun (admittedly when this author, who is now middle-aged, was 1 year old in 1986), humanity responded with a fleet of spacecraft known informally as the "Halley Armada." Yet because of the comet's trajectory, those spacecraft were only able to visit their target for a fleeting few hours, leaving planetary scientists wanting more. Now, a new paper by researchers at Khalifa University and their co-authors, available on the arXiv preprint server, describes a mission plan that would allow a spacecraft to rendezvous with this best-known comet for the first time. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-mission-rendezvous-halley-comet.html Space Exploration Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:00:05 EDT news708088306 UK astronomers have uncovered new clues about the origin of 3I/ATLAS—only the third known object from beyond the solar system ever spotted. In a new paper published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers reveal that the comet formed in extremely cold conditions, far from any star. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-interstellar-visitor-3iatlas-clues-frozen.html Astronomy Tue, 08 Sep 2026 11:50:01 EDT news708080978 Astronomers at Lund University in Sweden have found evidence of exocomets—comets in other solar systems—orbiting a young star similar to our sun. The observations point to a possible mechanism for how water might be transported from the cold outer regions of the planetary system to regions where planets form. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-young-sunlike-reveals-comets-planets.html Astrobiology Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:20:01 EDT news707564222 More than 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) from Earth, an ancient icy object is slowly awakening. As it drifts inward through the solar system, the frozen body known as Centaur 450P/LONEOS has begun releasing gas and dust—behavior more commonly associated with comets than with centaurs, the small icy objects that typically orbit between Jupiter and Neptune. https://phys.org/news/2026-09-saturn-encounter-distant-centaur-path.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 01 Sep 2026 18:00:04 EDT news707499541 What's so special about spotting Phobos crossing in front of the sun? Sure. It's just another image of Phobos crossing the disk of the sun, as seen from the surface of Mars. Like so much of the modern space era, these images, once amazing, are now almost routine. But there's some real science behind tasking the Mars rovers to conduct a little "Martian astronomy." https://phys.org/news/2026-09-martian-astronomy-percy-phobos-eclipse.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 01 Sep 2026 15:20:06 EDT news707482202 It has been a busy month for astronomy. In the midst of an eclipse season bookended by the total solar eclipse on Aug. 12 and the deep partial lunar eclipse coming up this week on Aug. 28, an outbound comet hanging high in the dawn sky just refuses to die: 220P/McNaught. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-comet-220p-mcnaught-encore.html Astronomy Wed, 26 Aug 2026 10:20:11 EDT news706947961 Sometimes images are released before anyone realizes they have been photobombed, meaning something unexpected showed up in the background. A team of researchers found a naked photobombing comet in publicly available archival data from the Subaru Telescope, resulting not in mirth but in serious scientific discoveries. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-naked-photobombing-comet-image.html Astronomy Tue, 25 Aug 2026 13:20:05 EDT news706874587 In the opening scene of American writer Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future," a heat wave combined with a breakdown of the electrical grid in India kills 20 million people. The devastation causes the world's nations to unite to combat climate change. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-world-inches-catastrophic-climate-events.html Environment Mon, 24 Aug 2026 12:42:53 EDT news706794146 Welcome back to our series on interstellar travel! In our first installment, we examined attempts to realize nuclear propulsion and how the technology could be used to reach the nearest star. In our second, we examined how fusion power has also been considered a means of propelling spacecraft to relativistic speeds (a fraction of the speed of light). In both cases, these proposals paralleled Cold War developments in rocketry and nuclear armaments, as they did for most space age advancements. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-interstellar-iv-solar-magnetic-energy.html Astronomy Thu, 20 Aug 2026 10:20:09 EDT news706437782 Deimos, the smaller and outermost of Mars' two moons, is roughly oval in shape and has a deep depression at its south pole. Unlike its heavily scarred sister moon, Phobos, Deimos is covered by a loose layer of dust and rubble—a so-called regolith layer—which gives it a smoother, dustier appearance. Although numerous space probes have provided increasingly detailed images of its surface over the past decades, the origins of the debris layer and the depression at the south pole remain unclear. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-asteroid-impact-mars-moon-deimos.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 18 Aug 2026 17:20:06 EDT news706273561 The NASA/ESA/CSA James Webb Space Telescope recently imaged NGC 2392 (also known as the Lion Nebula), named for its distinctive appearance, which resembles a lion's face seen head-on. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-webb-captures-clearest-image-lion.html Astronomy Tue, 18 Aug 2026 09:40:01 EDT news706262701 The surface of the moon is a bleak and forbidding place that could be hiding a lot of water ice within its dusty landscape. However, most possible ice deposits don't just stand out in an image. Scientists need specialized mapping to find those deposits, so they have devised another way to find the moon's frosty hidden reserves. They use seismic waves from moonquakes as locator beacons. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-moonquakes-reveal-lunar-ice-future.html Space Exploration Wed, 12 Aug 2026 08:40:05 EDT news705735495 The habitable zone concept is useful for understanding which worlds might, possibly, maybe, be habitable. It highlights exoplanets at the right distances from their stars for liquid water to potentially exist on their surfaces. But that alone can't determine habitability. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-mission-evolution-exoplanet-atmospheres.html Astrobiology Tue, 11 Aug 2026 21:00:01 EDT news705685681 The Perseid summer light show is back—and viewing conditions are especially promising for the Northern Hemisphere. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-perseid-meteor-shower-summer-dazzle.html Space Exploration Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:52:39 EDT news705505929 What shape is an asteroid? For (44) Nysa, the honest answer until now has been that nobody knew. It is one of the brightest and largest E-type asteroids in the main belt, a class with a surface rich in enstatite, and its oddness has made it a favorite target for well over a hundred years. Successive observations hinted that it was elongated, perhaps even two lumps stuck together, but the picture stayed frustratingly blurred. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-asteroid-worlds.html Space Exploration Sun, 09 Aug 2026 06:40:01 EDT news704978242 In the sweeping shadow of a satellite dish, staff at the Chilbolton Observatory in southern England track a growing number of objects in Earth's orbit, providing data that underpins Britain's space monitoring efforts. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-uk-observatory-nervously-space-junk.html Space Exploration Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:40:02 EDT news705288801 The recent confirmation of an atmosphere around a rocky exoplanet called LHS 1140b has created a wave of interest within the astronomy community. The planet orbits within the habitable zone around its parent star—a red dwarf located some 48 light-years from Earth. https://phys.org/news/2026-08-technology-star.html Space Exploration Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:20:01 EDT news705237481 Since 2016, an ordinary-looking F-type star called KIC 8462852, nicknamed Tabby's star, has behaved anything but ordinarily. In a new study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on July 6, researchers revisited this star to find out what is really causing its irregular dimming. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-hour-dip-tabby-star-decade.html Astronomy Mon, 03 Aug 2026 08:00:05 EDT news704472236 "Dead stars" known as white dwarfs have already shown the potential to help us better understand how planetary systems, including our own solar system, take shape and evolve. Now, research from the University of Michigan and the University of Colorado Boulder suggests that potential could be even greater than anticipated. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-dead-stars-healthy-appetites.html Astronomy Mon, 27 Jul 2026 15:40:03 EDT news704380621 Typically, astronomers identify comets by their distinct atmospheres, or comae, and their tails, which are created as the sun vaporizes a comet's ice. These features emit a glow when sunlight bounces off dust and water droplets. As gas escapes the body of the comet, it also acts as a tiny thruster, subtly changing the comet's path. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-asteroid-unexplained-orbital-shift-dark.html Astronomy Wed, 15 Jul 2026 11:11:43 EDT news703332667 Like a shelf in an old house, the Earth collects a lot of dust from its surroundings. This "space dust" is mostly made up of micrometeorites that survive atmospheric entry and provides researchers with a cheap and easy way to obtain samples to study our cosmic neighbors. However, it can be difficult to determine which objects certain samples originated from if their parent bodies aren't already in available catalogs. A recent study, published in Science Advances, describes a new subset of space dust with such mysterious origins and how researchers are tracking down potential sources. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-earth-space-unidentified-asteroids.html Astrobiology Tue, 07 Jul 2026 12:50:02 EDT news702646844 Last year, an interstellar traveler entered our solar system. Some speculated that it was an alien spacecraft, but it turned out to be a comet, 3I/Atlas, and it provoked interest from astronomers and astrophysicists eager for insights into galaxies far, far away. Detailed observations from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) shot down the alien spacecraft idea, but recent NASA analysis holds clues about the comet's ancient and, literally, alien origins. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-interstellar-comet-universe-cosmic-noon.html Astronomy Mon, 06 Jul 2026 22:20:01 EDT news702543074 Astronomers have used the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope (ESO's VLT) to study the composition of 3I/ATLAS, the brightest interstellar object ever seen, in detail. By measuring specific chemical fingerprints—the first observations of this kind for a comet that formed outside the solar system—they found that 3I/ATLAS likely originated in the outskirts of an old star system. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-older-sun-astronomers-clues-interstellar.html Astronomy Mon, 06 Jul 2026 08:03:06 EDT news702543737 Comets have played an interesting role in the history of astronomy. Since antiquity, many cultures saw them as omens or spirits, portending good or bad news for kings, queens and emperors. Over the past few hundred years, however, astronomers have studied them intently to understand the science behind these visitors to the inner solar system. Today, we know that these ghostly apparitions in the sky are dirty balls of ice and rock blasting through space, scattering dust and gases as they go. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-deuterium-comets-tales.html Planetary Sciences Sun, 05 Jul 2026 14:40:01 EDT news701946192 Astronomers have spotted many "red and dead" galaxies in the early universe. These are massive systems that stopped forming stars surprisingly early in cosmic history. Now, they may have found evidence of one in the act of becoming dead: a massive galaxy being stripped of its star-forming gas just 1.4 billion years after the Big Bang. The clues behind why it lost its star-forming material are detailed in a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server on June 16. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-astronomers-caught-early-galaxy-dying.html Astronomy Sat, 04 Jul 2026 09:40:01 EDT news701947729 Astronomers have revealed new details about the makeup and age of a visiting comet that was born around a distant star. They conclude that the composition of 3I/Atlas is strikingly different from any object found in our solar system. https://phys.org/news/2026-07-comet-star-composition-solar.html Astronomy Thu, 02 Jul 2026 12:00:03 EDT news702207542 One year ago, on July 1, 2025, astronomers discovered a fascinating new object moving through the solar system. Detected by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), the object was quickly recognized as something special. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-billion-years-interstellar-comet-older.html Astronomy Sun, 28 Jun 2026 14:00:01 EDT news701440080 The Gaia mission has allowed researchers to understand the motions of stars like never before, even revealing possible interactions between our solar system and nearby stars. Planetary Science Institute Senior Scientist Nathan Kaib and collaborator Sean Raymond (Universite de Bordeaux) have found that a recent stellar passage likely triggered a huge increase in comet formation as the star's gravity altered Oort cloud objects' orbits, sending them cascading into the inner solar system. We may even still be feeling the effects of this passage today. This work is being presented at the American Astronomical Society Division on Dynamical Astronomy. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-ancient-stellar-flyby-period-comets.html Astronomy Thu, 25 Jun 2026 19:40:04 EDT news701625061 For decades, astronomers and policymakers have been working on plans to protect our planet from killer asteroids. But now there's a new realm to protect: the thousands of satellites we're putting in orbit. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-happy-asteroid-day-prize-focuses.html Planetary Sciences Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:40:10 EDT news701432762 Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) scientists are using a solar wind forecasting method combined with analytic and numerical heliosphere models to find out where the first plasma boundary of the outer heliosphere lies as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft hurtles toward this mysterious region of space. https://phys.org/news/2026-06-solar-heliosphere-boundaries.html Planetary Sciences Mon, 22 Jun 2026 18:10:01 EDT news701364782