Tag Archives: "Comet"

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About 5,000 years ago a comet swept within 23 million miles of the sun, closer than the innermost planet Mercury. The comet must have been a spectacular sight to those young civilizations across Eurasia and North Africa that were arising at the end of the Stone Age. However, this nameless space visitor is not recorded in any known historical account. So how do astronomers know that there was such an interplanetary intruder? Enter comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4), which first appeared near the beginning of 2020. ATLAS quickly met an untimely death in mid-2020 when it disintegrated into a cascade of small icy pieces. Such a comet’s self-destruction happens once or twice a decade. Astronomer Quanzhi Ye of the University of Maryland reports that ATLAS is a broken-off piece of that ancient visitor from 5,000 years ago. Why? Because ATLAS follows the same orbital “railroad track” as that of a comet seen in 1844. This means the two comets are siblings from the parent comet that broke apart very long ago. The link between the two comets was first noted by amateur astronomer Maik Meyer. Such comet families are common. The most dramatic visual example was in 1994 when the doomed comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 (SL9) was pulled into a string of pieces by Jupiter’s gravitational pull. This “comet train” was short-lived. It fell piece by piece into Jupiter in July 1994. But comet ATLAS is just “weird,” says Ye, who observed it with Hubble about the time of the breakup. Unlike its hypothesized parent comet, ATLAS disintegrated while it was farther from the Sun than Earth, at a distance of over 100 million miles. This was much farther than the distance where its parent passed the Sun. “This emphasizes its strangeness,” said Ye. “If it broke up this far from the sun, how did it survive the last passage around the sun 5,000 years ago? This is the big question,” said Ye. “It’s very unusual because we wouldn’t expect it. This is the first time a long-period comet f

STScI: Comet ATLAS May Have Been a Blast from the Past

In a new study using observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, astronomer Quanzhi Ye of the University of Maryland in ...
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NOIRLab: Giant Comet Found in Outer Solar System by Dark Energy Survey

NOIRLab: Giant Comet Found in Outer Solar System by Dark Energy Survey

A giant comet from the outskirts of our Solar System has been discovered in 6 years of data from the ...
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STScI: Comet Makes a Pit Stop Near Jupiter's Asteroids

STScI: Comet Makes a Pit Stop Near Jupiter’s Asteroids

After traveling several billion miles toward the Sun, a wayward young comet-like object orbiting among the giant planets has found ...
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NOIRLab: A Dizzying Show by Comet NEOWISE

NOIRLab: A Dizzying Show by Comet NEOWISE

Gemini Observatory images reveal striking details of our recent celestial visitor’s rotation ...
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