All About Space

1 min read

As I write this, I've just come back from a successful early morning session observing Comet NEOWISE. It's currently glowing at magnitude +3, slightly dimmer than when I first pointed my camera at it a few nights ago. Even without optical aid the com

All About Space

3 min read

Agiant comet found far out in the Solar System may be 1,000 times more massive than a typical comet, making it the largest ever found in modern times. Officially designated on 23 June, it’s called C/2014 UN271, or Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its di

Science Illustrated

8 min read

Astronomers have reconstructed the journey of a single grain of dust, from its formation in a dying star more than 7 billion years ago to its arrival in Murchison, Victoria, aboard a meteorite. Seven billion years ago, a tiny dust grain formed in the

Nautilus

19 min read

Space is a cold and barren place. Nothing can exist there, nothing!” Ludwig Von Drake, an obscure uncle of Donald Duck and a professor of astronomy, is sitting on a high stool in his observatory. When he sees that he is being filmed, he falls off and

All About Space

1 min read

An interstellar gas cloud collapses under its own gravity to form a group of new stars, one of which is the Sun. A dusty disc of material forms around the new star. Gravity slowly pulls this material together – a process that will eventually form the

Australian Sky & Telescope

2 min read

EVERYTHING WE THINK WE KNOW about the universe beyond our Solar System has come from photons and a few grains of interstellar dust. But that near-complete material isolation is about to end. Our system apparently buzzes with objects from elsewhere in

How It Works

1 min read

This gentle rain of space dust consists of bits of comets and asteroids, a total of 4,700 tonnes, far outweighing larger meteorites that hit the planet. Only about nine tonnes of larger space rocks land on Earth annually. Despite the large quantities

How It Works

2 min read

Astronomers have detected the largest organic molecule ever seen in a cloud of planetforming dust, potentially offering new insights into the way that the building blocks of life end up on planets. Using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Arr

All About Space

1 min read

By examining Antarctic snow researchers have discovered, for the first time, interstellar dust that recently fell to Earth, a new study finds. These findings may shed light on the mysterious interstellar clouds the Solar System flies through regularl

AppleMagazine

1 min read

The solar system may have another foreign guest. Both NASA and the European Space Agency are reporting that a newly discovered comet zooming toward the sun is likely from another star. Astronomers said it’s traveling 93,000 mph (150,000 kph), so fast

All About Space

6 min read

When you think about space, your mind is drawn to the very big – planets, stars and galaxies. But many of the universe’s secrets are hidden away in the stuff you can barely see: cosmic dust. Take our own Solar System. The gaps between the planets are

Sparkle Buds Magazine

1 min read

What is a Comet? A comet is a small chunk of dust and ice that orbits, or travels around, the sun. It is sometimes described as a “dirty snowball.” There are billions of comets in the solar system, but most never pass close by Earth. The best-known c

All About Space

1 min read

Comets contain vast amounts of water-ice, both on their surface and underground. We think they may have been responsible for delivering water to Earth in its past, so studying them can tell us more about whether this is true or not. It’s also thought

All About Space

1 min read

Dying stars can blast dust out of their host galaxies and into the void between. Mergers between galaxies and dwarf galaxies can also create intergalactic dust. It is important to study intergalactic dust because it can dim light arriving at Earth fr

TechLife News

1 min read

The solar system may have another foreign guest. Both NASA and the European Space Agency are reporting that a newly discovered comet zooming toward the sun is likely from another star. Astronomers said it’s traveling 93,000 mph (150,000 kph), so fast

Futurity

2 min read

The Earth is partly made from stardust from red giant stars, researchers report. They can also explain why the Earth contains more of this stardust than the asteroids or the planet Mars, which are farther from the sun. Around 4.5 billion years ago, a

All About Space

1 min read

Cosmic dust landing in Antarctica becomes trapped in the ice and lies undisturbed for millions of years. This creates a historical record of past events. Amateur Norwegian scientist Jon Larsen found cosmic dust in 300 kilograms of material rescued f

All About Space

1 min read

A 75-kilometre (47-mile) swath of desert is strewn with strange, dark, glassy rocks that have long puzzled scientists. New research finds that those rocks are quite similar to comet particles collected by a NASA mission called Stardust. The scientist

The Atlantic

4 min read

Astronomers describe what it's like to chart the first confirmed object from outside our home in the cosmos.

Australian Sky & Telescope

3 min read

Some comets brighten slowly and fade rapidly; others show relatively symmetrical light curves. But the most ‘obliging’ comets (all other things being equal) are those that rapidly brighten as they move toward perihelion, and fade only slowly as they

BBC Sky at Night

2 min read

What do you think happened at the birth of our Solar System? Our proposal is that dust from dying stars travels in the interstellar medium, gets incorporated in a so-called molecular cloud which collapses and forms new stars like our Sun. Around the

Futurity

4 min read

Researchers have discovered a grain of dust forged in the death throes of a long-gone star. The discovery challenges some of the current theories about how dying stars seed the universe with raw materials for the formation of planets and, ultimately,

Country Life

2 min read

TWENTY years ago, I camped out in the Sahara desert with a couple of Libyans and I remember two things: the almost painful brightness of the night sky, unobscured by wisp of cloud or earthly light, and the small rocks that I rather nervously supposed

AppleMagazine

1 min read

Last year’s visitor from another star system — a cigar-shaped object briefly tumbling through our cosmic neck of the woods — has now been identified as a comet. A European-led team makes the case in Wednesday’s edition of the journal Nature. Telescop

Australian Sky & Telescope

2 min read

All comet observers agree that the objects of their interest are unpredictable, and this was certainly demonstrated by C/2021 A1 (Leonard) when it emerged into southern skies in December and January. Frequently, a predicted spectacle turns out to be

The Paris Review

1 min read

after Valmiki’s Ramayana (Aranya Kanda, Sarga 46) Dressed simply but notwithout elegance, holding ritualstaff and parasol Radiating gloom, like an asteroid with designs on a starlike night’s curved shadow that swims across the Earthlike the darkness

The Atlantic

3 min read

The mysterious space object 'Oumuamua may harbor ice under a crust hardened by cosmic radiation.

HELLO magazine

2 min read

A stellar display graced Blackpool last week as a comet soared across the night sky, adding to the city’s famous illuminations. Comet Neowise blazed an impressive trail across the sky, coming close enough to Earth during its 6,800-year orbit of the S

Futurity

2 min read

Scientists have solved a nagging space mystery: why comets expel oxygen gas, the same gas we breathe. The discovery that comets produce oxygen gas—also referred to as molecular oxygen or O2—was announced in 2015 by researchers studying the comet 67P/

The Atlantic

3 min read

The isotope iron-60, produced when a star explodes, is hidden in some of Earth’s most isolated places.