The first comet sample-return mission is still revealing secrets about its icy target — even 18 years after bringing to Earth a precious cargo for scientists to dissect. After launching in 1999, NASA’s Stardust mission rendezvoused with the comet named 81P/Wild 2 (81P/ means it was the 81st periodic comet […]
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A comet-like planet beyond our solar system is losing a lot more atmosphere in its vast tail than previously thought, intriguing astronomers and sparking new questions about how planets evolve with their parent stars. The exoplanet WASP-69b, a hot, puffy gas giant 160 light-years from Earth that circles its host […]
The caves on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko CNES/ESA/Rosetta/MPS/OSIRIS/Guillaume Faury et al. We have spotted caves on a comet for the first time. The caves, identified on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko – also known as comet 67P – are full of ice, which could help explain mysterious jets that astronomers have seen coming from the […]
Cryovolcanic comet 12P/Pons-Brooks has a diameter of about 18.6 miles Scientists found it erupts every 15 days, putting the next one on Friday READ MORE: Massive ‘devil comet’ explodes again in its largest outburst yet By Stacy Liberatore For Dailymail.com Published: 20:18 GMT, 28 December 2023 | Updated: 20:18 GMT, 28 […]
Earth may experience an entirely new meteor shower this December when our planet enters a stream of the debris left around the sun by a near-Earth comet. These meteors will appear to stream from the direction of the star Lambda-Sculptoris, meaning a potential name for this meteor shower is the […]
A colour lithograph from 1877 depicts the Andromedid meteor shower of 1872 Antiqua Print Gallery/Alamy A “lost” meteor shower may surprise skywatchers this weekend, astronomers have found, with the potential for as many as 200 meteors per hour on 2 December. The shower in question is the Andromedids, which is […]
It’s one of the biggest unanswered questions in science – if there’s life beyond Earth, where is it? Now, researchers from the University of Cambridge have narrowed down the search by identifying the right conditions for comets to deliver life-starting molecules. It has long been believed that the building blocks […]
A gust of solar wind appeared to make a comet wiggle its tail as it passed close to the sun. More observations of this phenomenon could help astronomers learn more about space weather in the region close to our star, where it is hard to send probes. Comets are small, […]