Comet

Debris from the most spectacular comet outburst ever is visible from Earth this month and astronomers hope the observations might shed some light on the puzzling event that brightened up the sky in 2007. When the faint Comet 17P/Holmes…

A new meteor shower could materialize from a crumbling comet and here’s how to watch it. On the evening of Monday, May 30, astronomy lovers may get to see a brand new meteor shower light up the night sky. Dubbed…

The most famous asteroid to collide with Earth is the Chicxulub crater, which hit the Yucatán Peninsula 65 million years ago. It’s known for wiping out the dinosaurs, along with three quarters of life on the planet. Other huge craters…

Throughout human history, comets have been seen as intensely meaningful, and as such have been the subject of intense study from ancient philosophers, priests, astrologers and scientists. Though often comparable in…

In 2014, the Japanese Space Agency JAXA launched the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft to visit asteroid Ryugu. It arrived at the asteroid in June 2018 and studied it from orbit for over a year. Hayabusa 2 even dispatched four rovers to the…

Using ground-based and space-based observations, a team of researchers has been monitoring a difficult-to-see comet carefully. It’s called Comet 323P/SOHO, and it was discovered over 20 years ago in 1999. But it’s difficult to observe…

Astronomy and anthropology have blended to help determine what might have triggered the decline of a major North American society 1,600 years ago. A vibrant culture lived in the Ohio Valley from about 200 BCE to 300 CE. These people…

By comparing our local Comet Hale-Bopp to the interstellar visitor 2I/Borisov, a team of astronomers have concluded that the interloper is perhaps one of the most pristine comets we’ve ever seen. “2I/Borisov could represent the first…

Harvard astrophysicists proposed a new model showing that the Chicxulub impactor — the celestial body responsible for the mass extinction of the dinosaurs — could have been of cometary, rather than asteroidal origin, in a study published…

New images of comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) show rapidly expanding spiral features in its coma produced by the rotation of its 5-km (3-mile) wide nucleus. These images of comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) were obtained with the Gemini North…