A new study by a Belgian team using data from the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (ESO’s VLT) has shown that iron and nickel exist in the atmospheres of comets throughout our Solar System, even those far from the Sun. A separate study by a Polish team, who also used ESO data, reported that […]
About 70,000 years ago, when the human species was already on Earth, a small reddish star approached our solar system and gravitationally disturbed comets and asteroids. Astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge have verified that the movement of some of these objects is still marked by that stellar encounter. […]
Two comets that will safely fly past Earth later this month may have more in common than their intriguingly similar orbits. They may be twins of a sort. Comet P/2016 BA14 was discovered on Jan. 22, 2016, by the University of Hawaii’s PanSTARRS telescope on Haleakala, on the island of Maui. It was initially thought […]