All posts tagged: Comet

May skygazing: A blue moon, fading comet, and a lot of meteors

May skygazing: A blue moon, fading comet, and a lot of meteors

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. May 1 Full Flower Moon May 4 One Last Chance to Catch Comet C/2025 R3 (Possibly) May 5 Eta Aquarids Meteor Shower Predicted Peak May 14 May’s Lāhainā Noon Begins May 31 Full Blue Micromoon It’s spring! All is beautiful and full of life, and apart from that one weird smell, all is well in the great outdoors. Along with flowers and seasonal allergies, this month brings us plenty of opportunities for stargazing, from not one but two full moons to a meteor shower and the year’s first Lāhainā noon. May 1: Full Flower Moon The full Flower Moon on May Day? How much more spring-y can spring get? Unsurprisingly, the Flower Moon gets its name from the blooms that burst into life as winter releases its hold on the land. The Farmer’s Almanac attributes the name to several possible North American sources, including the Algonquin peoples of the continent’s northeast and/or the Dakota people of the Midwest. The …

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS points to a far colder planetary birthplace

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS points to a far colder planetary birthplace

Published by Jenni Sidey

The water coming off comet 3I/ATLAS is not just unusual. It is extreme. Astronomers studying the interstellar comet found that its water is packed with an unusually heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium. The levels are far beyond anything measured in comets from our own solar system. That chemical fingerprint points to a birthplace much colder than the one that produced Earth. It is also colder than the places that formed the planets and the icy bodies that still circle the Sun. The result gives researchers one of their clearest looks yet at how different other planetary systems can be. “Our new observations show that the conditions that led to the formation of our solar system are much different from how planetary systems evolved in different parts of our galaxy,” said Luis Salazar Manzano, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in the University of Michigan’s Department of Astronomy. Astronomers studying the interstellar comet found that its water is packed with an unusually heavy form of hydrogen called deuterium. (CREDIT: Hans Anderson, Michigan …

Fastest comet ever recorded spewed 70 Olympic pools’ worth of water daily

Fastest comet ever recorded spewed 70 Olympic pools’ worth of water daily

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Astronomers knew 3I/ATLAS wasn’t a local comet not long after first spotting it in July 2025. As only the third interstellar object ever detected in our solar system, it offered researchers a rare—and brief—opportunity. With the right timing and equipment, scientists around the world could examine a cosmic visitor who possibly formed under far different conditions than those experienced in our own region of the galaxy. 3I/ATLAS is now sailing away from Earth and our solar system itself, but astronomers have already learned a wealth of information. The fastest comet ever recorded is covered in ice volcanoes, and emits a dusty trail of methanol and cyanide in its wake.  Earlier this month, the European Space Agency confirmed that 3I/ATLAS is also spewing the equivalent of 70 Olympic swimming pools’ worth of water every day. However, the exact type of water isn’t often seen here on Earth.According to astronomers at the University of Michigan (UM), the hydrogen in the comet’s …

We’ve caught a comet switching its spin direction for the first time

We’ve caught a comet switching its spin direction for the first time

Published by skeptic

An artist’s impression of comet 41P as it approached the sun and shot material off into space NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford (STScI) A small comet seems to have switched the direction in which it is rotating – the first time astronomers have seen evidence of such behaviour. Changes like this may help us learn about the insides of comets, which could reveal information about the composition of the early solar system. Comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák, or simply 41P, measures about 1 kilometre across and takes around 5.4 years to orbit the sun. We can only see it when it visits the inner solar system and its trajectory happens to take it relatively close to Earth. It was last seen in 2017. In March that year, it was rotating at a rate of about one full spin every 20 hours. When astronomers observed it just two months later, it had slowed down dramatically to one spin every 46 to 60 hours. Now, David Jewitt at the University of California, Los Angeles, has reanalysed observations from the Hubble …

April skygazing: An early micromoon, comet flyby, and the Lyrid meteor shower

April skygazing: An early micromoon, comet flyby, and the Lyrid meteor shower

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. April 1 Full Pink Moon April 17 Best Chance to See Comet C/2025 R3 April 19 The Moon, Venus, and Pleiades Conjunction April 22 Lyrid Meteor Shower Predicted Peak Spring has sprung, the annual hour of sleep has been stolen from us, and the days are getting longer.  But don’t fear, skygazers, there are still enough celestial sights to see this month to keep you happy. They include an early full moon, a meteor shower known for generating unexpected spectacles, and a lovely conjunction of the moon and one of our cosmic neighbors. Also, there’s a comet to see! Onwards!  April 1: Full Pink Moon A full moon on the first day of the month! As far as we know, there’s no name for this, but it doesn’t matter, because April’s moon is gifted with the most poetic of names anyway. It’s the Pink Moon, making April the best month of the year for fans of Nick Drake, Édith …

Mysterious comet disintegration caught by telescope after lucky break

Mysterious comet disintegration caught by telescope after lucky break

Published by skeptic

Comet K1 captured by the Hubble Space Telescope NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU) By a stroke of luck, we have seen a comet just days after it cracked into four pieces. This could provide a crucial window into the history of the solar system. John Noonan at Auburn University in Alabama and his colleagues had planned to observe a different comet with the Hubble Space Telescope, but limitations to the spacecraft’s ability to turn quickly made that impossible, so they found a new target: a comet called C/2025 K1 (ATLAS). When they pointed Hubble at K1, they saw not a single comet but four fragments. “We have seen comets break up before – we’ve seen them break up from the ground all the time – but this one wasn’t known to have broken up when we looked at it,” says Noonan. “The amount of sheer luck that came into acquiring these images cannot be overstated.” We have never taken such clear pictures of a comet that’s just broken up before, because it is hard to …

Scientists Startled by What Happens When They Point Hubble at Comet

Scientists Startled by What Happens When They Point Hubble at Comet

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Lady Fortune was on astronomers’ side when they pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at a comet drifting through our solar system. Just as they began observing the comet, it started breaking apart, providing an extraordinary chance to probe how these icy bodies evolve. “Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” John Noonan, a research physicist at Auburn University in Alabama, and coauthor of a new study published in the journal Icarus detailing the discovery, said in a statement about the work. After their original plans to observe a different comet fell through, “we had to find a new target,” he explained. “And right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.” Shortly before disintegrating, the comet, dubbed  C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) — a home-grown snowball, not to be confused with our interstellar visitor 3/I ATLAS — had completed its closest approach to the Sun, a point called perihelion, on October 8, …

Perplexity Launches Comet AI Browser for iPhone With Built-In Assistant

Perplexity Launches Comet AI Browser for iPhone With Built-In Assistant

Published by skeptic

Perplexity today expanded its Comet browser to iOS, making its AI Comet Assistant available to iPhone users. The Comet browser for iOS has many of the same features as the Comet browser for the desktop, including a voice mode for speaking questions and a hybrid search experience, but it does lack extensions. Comet offers standard search results like you might expect from any web search, but the added Comet Assistant is able to provide more in-depth answers and complete tasks. Comet supports Perplexity’s Deep Research feature that’s able to ingest information from multiple web sources and provide quick, useful summaries. The Comet Assistant can also complete web-based tasks, like summarizing emails, searching for products, comparing prices across websites, and more. With the new iOS app, Comet works across different devices, so users can start a search on one device and pick it up on another. Perplexity does collect browsing and search history from Comet to create ad-targeting profiles to serve ads to users. Comet was priced at $200 per month when it first launched last …

Comet AI browser lands on iPhone, challenging Safari

Comet AI browser lands on iPhone, challenging Safari

Published by skeptic

Perplexity released its Comet AI browser as a standalone app for iPhone, expanding the fast-growing AI browser category for Apple’s mobile ecosystem. The launch follows an Android rollout late last year and marks a major shift in pricing: Comet, which debuted on desktop in 2025 with a $200-per-month subscription, is now free on mobile. AI browsers have been gaining popularity, and plenty of users will be excited for a good replacement for the iOS-native Safari browser. Why AI browsers like Comet are becoming popular AI assistants streamline research and routine tasks Comet blends a traditional browser with an AI assistant that can summarize pages, answer questions, and carry out tasks on a user’s behalf. That “agentic” approach — where the AI doesn’t just respond but actively navigates, clicks, and completes actions — has become a defining feature in a crowded field of AI-enhanced browsers. In long-term testing, Comet has proven compelling enough to replace traditional browsers for many day-to-day tasks, largely because of how tightly its AI is integrated. Instead of acting as a sidebar …

3I/ATLAS: Interstellar comet has water unlike any in our solar system

3I/ATLAS: Interstellar comet has water unlike any in our solar system

Published by skeptic

3I/ATLAS is pretty strange International Gemini Observatory/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/B. Bolin The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS contains water and carbon molecules at levels never before seen in our solar system. This suggests that it formed around an alien star radically different from and much older than the sun. Astronomers have been tracking 3I/ATLAS since it entered our solar system last year – and it is weird. It appears to be packed with far more carbon dioxide and water than almost any other comet we have seen, and early estimates put its age at 8 billion years – almost twice as old as the sun. Now, Martin Cordiner at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and his colleagues have found that its levels of deuterium – a form of hydrogen with an extra neutron – are at least 10 times higher than in any comet we have seen before. Deuterium naturally exists in small amounts in Earth’s oceans, but the levels in 3I/ATLAS are more than 40 times higher. “3I/ATLAS continues to astonish us with what it reveals about …