Browsing: Comet

A recently published study suggests that the Earth might have been visited by a giant space rock 13,000 years ago, an event which might have sparked an unusual cold period in the planet’s climate history. The Younger Dryas, also known as the Big Freeze, was a brief period of cold climatic conditions and drought which occurred […]

NASA has developed a harpoon that would make even the most pretentious pirate jealous: it can latch on to comets with surgical precision, without having to land on them. The harpoon, which measures six feet tall (almost two meters) was made out of pair of springs normally used to provide the suspension for trucks; the […]

Black holes are perhaps the most fascinating and staggering objects in the known Universe, and we are just now beginning to uncover their secrets. Dr. Sergei Nayakshin of the University of Leicester and his team found that doughnut-shaped dust shrouds that cover about half of supermassive black holes may very well be the result of […]

I was lucky enough this weekend to be away from the city and at an altitude of about 1800m, deep in the mountain side. The rare, clean atmosphere allowed for an uncanny view of the night sky, at least for an urbanite as myself, filled with the most distinguishable stellar bodies I’ve ever been granted […]

In a relevant display of  NASA’s fireball-observing network capabilities, a set of automatic robotic cameras caught a man-sized meteor as it blasted though Earth’s atmosphere causing a fireball spectacle. The event took place on May 20, when the 6-foot-wide (1.8-meter) space rock entered the atmosphere at about 66 miles (106 kilometers) above the city of […]

Every once in a while, the Sun gets a little hungry; in those times, it grabs on a little comet snack, and every once in a while, these ‘snacks’ are caught on tape. However, never has a comet been captured so spectacularly in its final moments as with the video released by NASA Tuesday. This […]

After six years of loneliness, this Valentine’s day was the charm for one of the veteran comet-chasing spacecrafts. As Stardust briefly met with the comet nicknamed Tempel 1, the spacecraft took dozens of pictures of the comet’s icy surface; but this was no random encounter – the purpose of it was to see how a […]

In 2004, NASA researchers identified the Apophis asteroid and after some quick calculations they states there is a chance the asteroid will hit our homey planet in 2029. A few observations and some other calculations later, they explained that that chance is extremely small for 2029, as well as other years to come. However, reports […]