Comets are our most direct link to the earliest stages of the formation and evolution of the solar system. Only every few years is a new comet discovered that is making its first trip to the inner solar system from the Oort ...
The ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA mission SOHO—short for Solar and Heliospheric Observatory—got a visit from an old friend this week when comet 96P entered its field of view on Oct. 25, 2017. The comet entered the ...
Launched March 2004 and following a 10-year journey across the solar system, the European Space Agency's Rosetta probe made history in 2014. It became the first spacecraft to orbit the nucleus of a comet—a frozen remnant ...
Two NASA teams want to deploy a highly compact, sensitive thermometer that could characterize comets and even assist in the redirection or possible destruction of an asteroid on a collision course with Earth.
A small, recently discovered asteroid - or perhaps a comet - appears to have originated from outside the solar system, coming from somewhere else in our galaxy. If so, it would be the first "interstellar object" to be observed ...
Citizen scientist Thomas Jacobs was the first to spot tell-tale signs that a comet was orbiting a distant star monitored by the Kepler Space Observatory. Professor Saul Rappaport (Massachusetts Institute of Technology; MIT) ...
Scientists from MIT and other institutions, working closely with amateur astronomers, have spotted the dusty tails of six exocomets—comets outside our solar system—orbiting a faint star 800 light years from Earth.
The missing link in our understanding of planet formation has been revealed by the first ever spacecraft to orbit and land on a comet, say German scientists. The study is published in a recent edition of the journal Monthly ...
The impressive jets of dust that comets emit into space during their journey around the Sun are not driven solely by the sublimation of frozen water. In some cases further processes augment the outbreaks. Possible scenarios ...
Narrow dense rings of comets are coming together to form planets on the outskirts of at least three distant solar systems, astronomers have found in data from a pair of NASA telescopes.
