Comets
Giant Planet May Be Lurking In ‘Poisonous’ Gas Around Beta Pictoris
A Saturn-mass planet might be lurking in the debris surrounding Beta Pictoris, new measurements of a debris field around the…
NEOWISE Spots a “Weirdo” Comet
NASA's NEOWISE mission -- formerly known as just WISE -- has identified the first comet of its new near-Earth object…
Comet ISON Hosted A Rare Kind Of Nitrogen, Hinting At Reservoirs In Young Solar System
Comet ISON -- that bright comet last year that broke up around Thanksgiving weekend -- included two forms of nitrogen…
Two Comets Pass in the Night Bound for Your Telescope
Remember comets Lovejoy and C/2012 X1 LINEAR? We dropped in on them in late January. On Feb. 6 the two cruised…
NEOWISE Spots Mars-Crossing Comet
One of the big ticket astronomical events of 2014 will be the close passage of Comet C/2013 A1 Siding Spring past…
Rosetta Is Happily Awake, But Comet Lander Will Slumber Until March
Now that Rosetta has (leisurely) arose from a 31-month slumber in space, the next step is to figure out how…
Lovejoy and X1 LINEAR: How to See Comets That Will Warm Up Your Mid-Winter Mornings
My hands are still cold from the experience, but there's no denying the pleasure I felt at seeing C/2013 R1…
After A Long Nap, NEOWISE Springs Into Action With Asteroid Discoveries
If anything, NASA's asteroid-hunting spacecraft seems to be refreshed after going into forced hibernation for 2.5 years. In the first…
Rosetta Wakes Up, Phones Home, Starts Tweeting
The silence from the live video feed from the ESA’s space operations center in Darmstadt, Germany was almost deafening. Scientists…
Wake Up, Rosetta!
It's being called "the most important alarm clock in the Solar System" -- this Monday, January 20, at 10:00 GMT…