The interstellar object 3I/ATLAS has gathered significant scientific attention, and soon it will reach its closest point to ...

Cometary orbits exhibit a wide range of shapes and eccentricities, not all being highly elliptical. Comets originating from the Oort Cloud possess highly eccentric elliptical orbits, subject to ...

THIS is a translation from the second edition of the first volume of Prof. Oppölzer's laborious and truly classical work in German, on the theory and practical determination of the orbits of comets ...

Scientists spotted the heavy water (which we'll get into in just a moment) in the planet-forming disk of gas and dust around ...

Could a vagabond giant from the outermost regions of interstellar space be poised on the cusp of sweeping by our cosmic doorstep? Astronomers say yes and they have the data to support it. Using the ...

The chunks of ice and dust that make their home in the Oort cloud, far beyond the orbit of Pluto, sometimes become dislodged and head into the solar system as streaky comets. Some disruptions, caused ...

When the comet 17P/Holmes orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter burst out, it spread a vast number of particles on its trail. Academic project leader Maria Gritsevich is involved in multinational ...

Paul Weissman, lead scientist at the Table Mountain Observatory, part of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, offers the following answer. The Oort cloud is a huge spherical cloud of some 10 12 comets ...

THE volume which we have before us contains, as its title indicates, a list of the orbits of all those comets which have up to the present time been calculated. As our readers may already be aware, ...

As Earth orbits the sun, it ploughs through dust and debris left behind by comets and asteroids. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

An artist's illustration depicts a massive asteroid impact on earth. Discussions about "death from above" scenarios usually center on asteroids, but a comet impact could be far more devastating than a ...

ON JULY 19th 1862 Horace Parnell Tuttle, an assistant at Harvard College Observatory, spotted a comet in the constellation of Camelopardalis. After he announced his discovery, Lewis Swift, an observer ...