Comets & Asteroids

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has observed a mysterious X-shaped debris pattern and trailing streamers of dust that suggest a head-on collision between two asteroids.

NASA's WISE mission has spotted 16 near-Earth objects that had previously been hidden in the dark

We present numerical simulations to model the production of observable long-period comets (LPCs) from the Oort Cloud, a vast reservoir of icy bodies surrounding the Sun. We show that inner Oort Cloud objects can penetrate Jupiter's orbit via a largely unexplored dynamical pathway, and they are an important, if not the dominant, source of known LPCs.

McNaught has just discovered his 50th comet. He spotted it, as he does most often these days, on images taken with the 20-inch (0.5-meter) Uppsala Schmidt telescope at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia.

The Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams (CBAT) -- operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the International Astronomical Union (IAU) -- has announced the recipients of the 2009 Edgar Wilson Award for the discovery of comets by amateurs during the calendar year ending June 11.

The outburst and subsequent brightness evolution of Comet 17P/Holmes has been observed using the MMT Observatory's All-Sky Camera (Pickering 2006) on Mt. Hopkins near Tucson, Arizona, USA.

The 2009 Edgar Wilson Award honors amateur astronomers who discovered five different comets in the last 12 months, proving that backyard comet hunting still thrives in this age of automated professional sky patrols.

The Quadrantid shower, one of the most intense showers, has been observed at the beginning of January each year. However, the origin of the meteors is still unknown. It was Hasegawa (1979) who first suggested comet C/1490 Y1 to be the likely origin of the shower based on the historical records of East Asia.

Three new comets have been discovered in the last few days.....

IAU Circular nr.9071, issued on 2009, Sep. 10, announces the discovery of a new comet by R. H. McNaught, named C/2009 R1 (McNAUGHT). This comet may reach magnitude 5 at the end of June 2010, but the elongation will be very small (only 18 degree on June 27, 2010) and so the observing conditions.

Jupiter has been caught 'kidnapping' comets when they venture too close, forcing them to become temporary satellites of the great planet before they are slingshot away or spiral into Jupiter, according to new data presented at this week's European Planetary Science Congress (EPSC) in Potsdam, Germany.

Comet 147P/Kushida-Muramatsu was captured as a temporary moon of Jupiter in the mid-20th century and remained trapped in an irregular orbit for about twelve years.

The outburst of Comet 17P/Holmes was so violent that it blew huge chunks of the comet's surface clean off, according to a new analysis of images taken in November 2007.

Toward the end of September, the sun will turn a spotlight on the asteroid Juno, giving that bulky lump of rock a rare featured cameo in the night sky.

An analysis of the dust surrounding the outburst of a young star suggests an explanation for how the crystals inside comets are formed

The confusion over whether the great Virginia fireball Sunday night was a meteor or a Russian rocket re-entry seems to be resolved - in favor of a meteor