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.
If you have long suspected the mainstream is being less than honest [or simply delusional] when they describe Comets as “dirty snowballs” or [more recently] “icy dirtballs” then you might be interested to discover Close Cometary Encounters are associated with sudden spikes in the level of Thorium 232.
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.
“Comets travel much faster than asteroids, and some of them are very big,” said Amy Mainzer, co-author based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, and principal investigator of the NEOWISE mission. “Studies like this will help us define what kind of hazard long-period comets may pose.”
The finding shows that oxygen can be generated in space without the need for life, and could influence how researchers search for signs of life on exoplanets.
Newly discovered chemical reaction could generate the gas instead, study suggests
A new study from the University of Edinburgh has linked comet activity to a period of cooling in Earth’s past.
A rare opportunity to study a comet using radar technology has yielded new measurements of this traveling space rock’s size, shape, geology and rotation rate.
The Hubble Space Telescope has found a white dwarf star consuming a huge comet, scattering its remains throughout its atmosphere.
NASA’s NEOWISE mission has recently discovered some celestial objects traveling through our neighborhood, including one on the blurry line between asteroid and comet. Another—definitely a comet—might be seen with binoculars through next week.
