The University of Alaska Fairbanks invites the public to view a celestial visitor that hasn’t traveled near Earth in at least 80,000 years. Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, pronounced Choo-cheen-SHAHN-ATLAS, was discovered in January 2023 by the Purple Mountain Observatory in China. The comet could have its best viewing for Alaskans throughout next week — weather permitting. Space physicists from […]
New analysis of materials from an archeological site in Syria suggests it may be the only human settlement we know about that was destroyed by pieces of an exploding comet. Abu Hureyra, an ancient mound site, is covered by the waters of Lake Assad, created when the Tabqa Dam was completed in 1974. In […]
As the brilliant comet 46P/Wirtanen streaked across the sky, NASA telescopes caught it on camera from multiple angles. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope photographed comet 46P/Wirtanen on Dec. 13, when the comet was 7.4 million miles (12 million kilometers) from Earth. In this visible-light image, the comet’s nucleus is hidden in the center of a fuzzy […]
Japanese astronomers observed the elusive “Phoenicid meteor shower” and have determined that it was spawned by the now vanished Comet Blanpain. They also found that Comet Blanpain was active, though only weakly, in the early 20th Century. This is the first time that researchers could determine the activity of a comet by observing its associated […]