Comets | Universe Today

A prototype telescope with an enhanced ability to find moving objects will soon be operational, and its mission will be to detect asteroids and comets that could someday pose a threat to Earth. The system is called Pan-STARRS (for Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System) located on Haleakala mountain in Maui,Hawaii, and is the first of four telescopes that will be housed together in one dome. Pan-STARRS will feature the world's largest and most advanced digital camera, providing more than a fivefold improvement in the ability to detect Near Earth Asteroids and comets. "This is a truly giant instrument," said University of Hawaii astronomer John Tonry, who led the team developing the new 1.4-gigapixel camera. "We get an image that is 38,000 by 38,000 pixels in size, or about 200 times larger than you get in a high-end consumer digital camera." The Pan-STARRS camera will cover an area of sky six times the width of the full moon and it can detect stars 10 million times fainter than those visible to the naked eye.
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The astronomy world buzzed in the Fall of 2007 when Comet Holmes – a normally humdrum, run-of-the-mill comet — unexpectedly flared and erupted. Its coma of gas and dust expanded away from the comet, extending to a volume larger than the Sun. Professional and amateur astronomers around the world turned their telescopes toward the spectacular event. Everyone wanted to know why the comet had suddenly exploded. The Hubble Space Telescope observed the comet, but provided few clues. And now, observations taken of the comet after the explosion by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope deepen the mystery, showing oddly behaving streamers in the shell of dust surrounding the nucleus of the comet. The data also offer a rare look at the material liberated from within the nucleus. "The data we got from Spitzer do not look like anything we typically see when looking at comets," said Bill Reach of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at Caltech.
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A strange Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) has been discovered orbiting the Sun in the wrong direction. The object, designated as 2008 KV42 but nicknamed Drac (after Dracula, as vampires are fabled to have the ability to walk on walls), has a highly inclined orbit of 103.5°. Drac is a rarity as very few objects in the Solar System have retrograde orbits; in fact this kind of orbit is usually exclusive to Halley-type comets that have orbits that take them very close to the Sun. Drac on the other hand travels through the Kuiper Belt in a stable orbit at a distance of between 20-70 AU from the Sun. This finding has puzzled astronomers, but Drac may provide clues as to where Halley-type objects originate…
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Are some asteroid masked of their true identity?

A frequent plot device in the old "Mission: Impossible" television show was the special masks the IMF team used so they could impersonate anyone. Viewers were often surprised to find out who ended up being an imposter. Similarly, astronomers and planetary scientists are considering that a fair amount of Near Earth Objects (NEOs) aren't what they appear: they could be comets impersonating asteroids. Paul Abell, from the Planetary Science Institute says between five and ten percent of NEOs could be comets that are being mistaken for asteroids, and Abell is working on ways to make unmasking them a mission that's possible.
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I wanted to see it myself before I said anything - but now it's confirmed. Comet W1 Boattini is now visible in the northern hemisphere! So what if you have to get up before dawn? While its overall brightness is good enough to be seen with the unaided eye, I needed a lot of help, and maybe you'd like some, too? Read more…

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On June 25th, the ESA/NASA SOHO spacecraft discovered its 1,500th comet, making it more successful than all other comet discoverers throughout history, combined. But wait a minute, SOHO is the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, designed to study solar physics. What’s it doing looking for comets? SOHO just happens to have a great vantage point to see comets as they approach the sun. Since its orbit is situated between the Sun and Earth, it has a unique view of the regions close to the sun that we can rarely see from Earth. But SOHO’s comet-finding success is just an added benefit to the extraordinary revelations this spacecraft has provided in its 13 years in space, observing the Sun and the near-Sun environment. “Catching the enormous total of comets has been an unplanned bonus,” said Bernhard Fleck, ESA SOHO Project Scientist.
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Astoundingly, about 40,000 tons of dust particles fall to Earth each year which originates from space "leftovers," mostly from disintegrating comets and asteroid collisions. Scientists are very interested in this dust because of its pristine nature –it is made of the original building blocks of the solar system. Some of that dust also resides in Earth's atmosphere, and for years, NASA has routinely collected cosmic and interplanetary dust from Earth's stratosphere with high-altitude research aircraft. NASA announced today that a new mineral has been found from this atmospheric research, in material that likely came from a comet.

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There are just so many ways the Universe is out to get us. Astronomers have already considered the threat from our Sun's orbit around the center of the Milky Way. When our Sun rises up out of flat plane of the Milky Way, it appears we might be less protected from intergalactic radiation and cosmic rays. Well, it looks like passing through the middle of the galactic plane might have its own share of risks: an increased number of comets might be hurled towards the Earth because of gravitational interaction with the densest parts of our galaxy.
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Who can forget last October, when astronomers all over the world were astounded by the huge outburst of Comet Holmes? The eruption was the largest for more than a century. (Click on image to animate.) Fortunately for the world, a UK telescope was in the right place and the right time to capture the first images of this once-in-a-lifetime event. Read more…

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Just so it's clear in your mind: comets are dirty snowballs, asteroids are rocks. Got the difference? Wait… not so fast. Scientists studying the cometary dust picked up by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, and they're finding it's surprisingly asteroid like.
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It seemed like such a shame. NASA built Deep Impact to see what happens when you smash a refrigerator-sized object into a comet. Mission accomplished, science gathered. But what about the flyby part of the spacecraft? It captured images of the collision with Comet Tempel 1, and then flew on without a target. Well, NASA announced this week that it has a new target: Comet Hartley 2.
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For a little while there, Comet 17P/Holmes was the largest object in the Solar System, flaring up by a factor of over a million. Its cloud of gas and dust expanded outward to cover a diameter of 1.4 million km (870,000 miles) - bigger than the Sun. Well, the party's over. Comet Holmes is fading away again. But will it follow history and flare up again?
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All right, here's the picture we've all been waiting for. Step aside ground-based observatories, papa Hubble's here with images of Comet Holmes, which is now larger than the Sun. But don't get fooled. That beautiful image on the left was taken by amateur astronomer Alan Dyer from Alberta, Canada. Hubble's version on the right. It's not as pretty, but it's got inner bigness.
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All right, that title is a little misleading. In fact, when I first read the original press release, my skepticism alarms went off. But it's true, the amazing Comet Holmes now has a halo that's larger than the Sun. Not bad for a comet that, until three weeks ago, was just a tiny dim dirty snowball orbiting near Jupiter.
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Mark your calendars for November 13th, 2007. That's the day ESA's Rosetta spacecraft will be making a close encounter with Earth on its way to Comet 67/P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. What's going on? The comet's out there guys, why is Rosetta back home? Well, it's all about speed.
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Late last week, the normally dim Comet 17P/Holmes suddenly blazed into view, increasing in brightness by a factor of a million. Before the eruption you needed a large telescope to see it, and now you can make it out with the unaided eye - even in the light-polluted city skies.

There are now many amateur and professional astronomers turning their gaze towards the newly brightened comet.

Eric Allen has been capturing images for several days, and stitched them together into an animation that shows the expanding coma. Even cooler, he compares it to Jupiter visually, so you can see just how big and bright it has gotten.

UK astronomers tuned in with the powerful Isaac Newton Telescope in La Palma, showing the fuzzy coma. They also tucked in an image of the Earth in the bottom corner, for scale.

Astronomers from the University of Montreal captured this image that seems to show that the comet has an actual tail.

Probably the best image I've seen was captured by Mario Motta from the Amateur Telescope Makers in Boston. His image shows what clearly looks like a jet, blasting off one side of the comet.

Still want more images? Space Weather has this enormous photo gallery of images of Comet 17P/Holmes.

Over the next few days/weeks, I'm sure some even bigger telescopes will be joining the fray, so stay tuned.

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Astronomers from Europe and Asia are reporting that the normally dim Comet 17P/Holmes has had an eruption. Instead of being 17th magnitude - only visible to powerful telescopes - it's now 3rd magnitude. This makes it easy to spot with the unaided eye, even in cities with heavy light pollution.

To confirm this discovery, head outside after the skies are dark, and look to the Northeast. The comet is currently in the constellation Perseus, which is below the more familiar Cassiopeia. If you're familiar with the constellations at all, you'll now see a new, bright yellow star. A telescope reveals the fuzzy corona surrounding the comet.

One report from Japan says, "Perseus does not look 'Perseus' familiar to us due to the bright stellar object now."

Spaceweather and Bad Astronomy have more details.

Thanks to BAUT member Keith G for the photograph. Here's a link to the forum where people are discussing it.

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Comets are known as dirty snowballs. As they approach the Sun, the constant solar wind picks away at their snowy exterior, creating the beautiful tail we see trailing behind. But sometimes the solar wind is replaced with a solar hurricane, and in the case of Comet Encke, its graceful tail was completely torn off.
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When Deep Impact smashed into Comet Tempel 1, it did its job well… too well. Yes, it did carve out a crater on the surface of the comet, releasing a plume of debris visible from here on Earth. But there was a problem. The impact released so much debris into space that the spacecraft couldn't see the surface of the comet before it sped by. No problem, there's another handy spacecraft out there, with all the right equipment and nothing to do: Stardust.
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The most successful comet hunter is not some dedicated amateur who sacrifices night after night searching for icy bodies from the outer Solar System. It's not a robotic telescope surveying the heavens. Nope, it's SOHO - a space telescope staring at the Sun; and it discovers comets as a happy side benefit. But recently it turned up something new, one of Halley's cousins; a periodic comet.
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The traditional thinking is that life on Earth began… on Earth. At some point in our distant past, some mixture of amino acids made the jump from a pool of organic molecules to something more lifelike. But maybe the source of life on Earth came from space, hitching a ride aboard balls of ice and dust: comets.
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Scientists think they might have the solution to a mystery that's been haunting paleontologists for years: what caused an abrupt period of cooling 13,000 years ago and an extinction of the large mammals. The conventional theory is that when human hunters arrived in North America, they killed off all the tasty large mammals. But there's evidence that a comet exploded over North America at approximately the same time. This could also cause cooling, and wipe out the animals.
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Comet McNaught, one of the brightest comets in last few decades recently swept past the Sun, providing a beautiful show. Unfortunately, the comet was so low to the horizon that only viewers in the Southern hemisphere were able to see its brightest point.
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A small dwarf planet out past the orbit of Neptune could eventually become one of the brightest comets ever seen. Caltech professor Mike Brown - the discoverer of Eris - presented his calculations during the annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society held in Seattle in early January.
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Although it's viewed more than 1,000 comets, NASA and ESA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory has never seen anything like Comet McNaught.
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