Supernova-hunting team finds comet with aid of amateur astronomer
Carnegie's Benjamin Shappee is part of a team of scientists, including an Australian amateur astronomer, which discovered a new comet last week.
Jul 29, 2017
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Large, distant comets more common than previously thought
Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" will never ...
Bizarro comet challenging researchers
Scientists pursue research through observation, experimentation and modeling. They strive for all of these pieces to fit together, but sometimes finding the unexpected is even more exciting.
Snake robots to assist astronauts
Norwegian researchers are looking into how a snake robot might carry out maintenance work on the International Space Station (ISS), study comets, and explore the possibility of living and working in lava tunnels on the Moon.
Relation between comets and earth's atmosphere uncovered
The difficult yet successful measurement of several isotopes of the noble gas xenon on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko using the Bernese instrument ROSINA on the Rosetta probe shows that materials arrived on Earth due to ...
Wow! mystery signal from space finally explained
(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with the Center of Planetary Science (CPS) has finally solved the mystery of the "Wow!" signal from 1977. It was a comet, they report, one that that was unknown at the time of the signal ...
NASA's asteroid-hunting spacecraft a discovery machine
NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its third year of survey data, with the spacecraft discovering 97 previously unknown celestial objects in the last year. Of those, ...
Comet V2 Johnson takes center stage
Had your fill of binocular comets? Turns out, 2017 may have saved the best for last. The past few months has seen a steady stream of dirty snowball visitations to the inner solar system, both short term periodic and long ...
Chemical engineers explain oxygen mystery on comets
A Caltech chemical engineer who normally develops new ways to fabricate microprocessors in computers has figured out how to explain a nagging mystery in space—why comets expel oxygen gas, the same gas we humans breathe.
'Celestial Sleuth' credits Messier with discovery 238 years after the fact
The Ring Nebula is one of the most spectacular deep-sky objects in the heavens. It is easily located by backyard astronomers, intensely studied by astrophysicists and relied upon for show-stopping images on countless book ...
