Comets - NASA Science
Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the Sun. When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet’s orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets.
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Arrives from Afar - NASA Earth …
Oct 11, 2024 · Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, which likely traveled from the outer reaches of our solar system, made its closest transit past the Sun on September 27 and was expected to come within approximately 70 million kilometers (44 million miles) of …
Ancient Comet Makes Appearance - NASA
Oct 11, 2024 · The comet hails from the Oort Cloud, which scientists think is a giant spherical shell surrounding our solar system. It is like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris the sizes of mountains and sometimes larger.
ESA, NASA Solar Observatory Discovers Its 5,000th Comet
Mar 27, 2024 · The 5,000 th comet discovered with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft is noted by a small white box in the upper left portion of this image. A zoomed-in inset shows the comet as a faint dot between the white vertical lines. The image was taken on March 25, 2024, by SOHO’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), which uses a disk to block the bright Sun and ...
NASA’s Webb Finds Water, and a New Mystery, in Rare Main Belt Comet
May 15, 2023 · Using Webb’s NIRSpec (Near-Infrared Spectrograph) instrument, astronomers have confirmed gas – specifically water vapor – around a comet in the main asteroid belt for the first time, indicating that water ice from the primordial solar system can be …
What Is a Comet? | NASA Space Place – NASA Science for Kids
Jan 14, 2025 · A comet has two tails that get longer the closer it gets to the Sun. Both tails are always directed away from the Sun. The ion tail (blue) always points directly away from the Sun, while the dust tail (yellow) points away from the Sun in a …
4,000th Comet Discovered by ESA & NASA Solar Observatory
On June 15, 2020, a citizen scientist spotted a never-before-seen comet in data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO — the 4,000th comet discovery in the spacecraft’s 25-year history.
APOD: 2023 August 21 – Introducing Comet Nishimura
The comet will get so close to the Sun-- inside the orbit of planet Mercury-- that its nucleus may break up. Pictured, Comet Nishimura was imaged three days ago from June Lake, California, USA while sporting a green coma and a thin tail. Tomorrow's picture: nebula unknown
APOD: 2025 January 24 - Comet G3 ATLAS: a Tail and a Telescope
A visitor from the distant Oort Cloud, the comet reached its perihelion on January 13. On January 19, the bright comet was captured here from ESO Paranal Observatory in the Atacama desert in Chile. Sporting spectacular sweeping dust tails, this comet ATLAS is setting in the southern hemisphere twilight and was clearly visible to the unaided eye.
Asteroid and Comet Resources - Science@NASA
4 days ago · The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a joint mission of ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA, discovered its 5,000th comet in March 2024, thanks to the help of volunteer comet hunters participating in the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project. Watch. Observing Comet Siding Spring at Mars.