Latest Comet Stories
April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online European Space Agency's (ESA) Herschel Space Observatory has discovered pristine material that matches comets in our own Solar System in a dust belt around the young star Beta Pictoris. Beta Pictoris is 12 million years old, and resides a short 63 light-years from Earth. A gas giant planet and a dusty debris disc that has the potential to evolve into a torus of icy bodies like those of the Kuiper Belt found outside the orbit of...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Hale-Bopp, Haley’s, McNaught. These are just a few of the more well-known modern comets that have blazed across the night sky in our lifetime. Another comet that has been recently discovered could be added to that list next year when it makes a pass by the Sun in late 2013. The comet, named C/2012 S1 (ISON), is due to come within 1.1 million miles of the Sun on, or around, November 29, 2013. Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novichonok...
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online In an effort to better understand how life started on Earth, researchers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California are cooking up icy concoctions of organisms (carbon-bearing molecules) then zapping them with lasers. The JPL crew’s experiments also provide the first direct look at the organic chemistry that takes place in the chilly regions of our solar system, and even chillier reaches between stars....
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Sometime early Monday morning while most of the country was in bed dreaming of sweet nothings, at least two amateur astronomers were out blazing the night skies looking for action. And what they found was the event of a lifetime: A two-second white flash on the surface of Jupiter. Amateur astronomer Dan Peterson, from Racine, Wisconsin, first reported his sighting of the explosion on Jupiter on the cloudynights.com forum. A second...
Michael Harper for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Every year around this time, hurricanes and tropical storms churn out from the Atlantic ocean, striking the Caribbean Islands and the East and Gulf Coasts of the U.S. As such, every year, this season provides meteorologists the opportunity to monitor and study these deadly and destructive storms, working to better understand these storms and improve their tracking technologies. Using a combination of on-the-ground tools and...
[ Watch the Video: ScienceCasts: 2012 Perseid Meteor Shower ] April Flowers for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Every year in August, the Perseid Meteor shower is visible to the naked eye and is a favorite for professional and amateur astronomers alike. The Perseid shower has it all. It offers a consistently high rate of meteors, it produces more bright, visible meteors than any other shower, it happens in August when many people are on vacation, and it happens at a time when...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online Astronomers have started to answer questions about two unsolved puzzles about the building blocks of our Solar System. Two questions that have puzzled scientists about comets and asteroids are: How did icy comets obtain particles that formed at high temperatures? And, how did these refractory particles acquire rims with different compositions? Researchers from Carnegie Institution for Science have modeled the trajectories of these...
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online New research suggests that meteorites, and their parent asteroids, are most-likely the sources of Earth's water. Scientists have believed that comets, or a primitive meteorite called carbonaceous chondrites, were the sources of earth Earth's volatile elements, including hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon. Having an understanding of where these volatiles came from is crucial when determining the source of water and life on the planet....
Lee Rannals for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online One star pinpointed as a prime location for a planet-forming disk decided enough was enough, and closed-up shop suddenly. While observing TYC 824126521, a young star located about 456 light years from Earth, researchers discovered that the planet-forming dust that once surrounded the star abruptly disappeared. Between 2008, when the star was being observed by a powerful infrared telescope in Chile, and 2010, when NASA's WISE...
[ Watch the Video] The long and tumultuous history of asteroid Lutetia was revealed by ESA’s Rosetta spacecraft as it raced past this large, ancient asteroid. This spectacular movie shows a sequence of images snapped by Rosetta as it flew past the main-belt asteroid on 10 July 2010. The sequence begins nine and a half hours before Rosetta made its closest pass, when the asteroid still appeared like a distant tumbling speck seen from a distance of 500 000 km. Surface features...
Latest Comet Reference Libraries
A Shubunkin is a type of single-tailed goldfish with calico coloration, a combination of orange, white, black, red, and blue markings, blue being the most desired. They are similar to the common goldfish and the comet goldfish. Also called speckled goldfish, harlequin goldfish, calico goldfish, and coronation fish, they were developed in Japan about a hundred years ago by crossing calico fantails with single-tailed goldfish to produce a hardy, able swimmer with bright colors. There are...
A Fantail goldfish is a standard "fancy" type of goldfish. It has a dual-lobed tail, unlike its cousin the common or comet. Its fins can be different sizes, ranging from 1-3 in or more in length. A typical fantail has paired fins, including anal fins, a single dorsal fin, and a round, pointed body shape. It can range in color, from bronze (known as chocolate), orange, red, calico, and mixes of the colors. It is the third hardiest of the fancy goldfish with Comet first and Shubunkin second,...
The Comet is a commonly kept form of goldfish, the only type to have originated in the United States. They first appeared in the ponds of the Fish Commission in Washington in the early 1880s. Hugo Mullertt was the first person to bring the Comet goldfish to the market in a large quantity. Characterized by a long, tall, flowing tailfin they can be differentiated from the common goldfish, although otherwise they are very similar. Both of these varieties are quite hardy and will do well in...
Comet -- A comet is a small body from the outer reaches of the solar system similar to an asteroid but composed of ice. Often described as "dirty snowballs," they are composed largely of carbon dioxide ice, methane ice, and water ice with a mixture of dust and small stony aggregates mixed in. Comets are thought to be small pieces of debris left over from the formation of the solar system, representing a sample of the original composition of the nebula that condensed to form the Sun and all...
The Solar System refers to the area in space that is dominated by our own Sun. It is comprised of the Sun and its associated astronomical objects that are held in its gravitational orbit. The Solar System was formed as a result of the collapse of a giant molecular cloud approximately 4.6 billion years ago. The mass of this system is located almost entirely in the Sun. Apart from the Sun, a high percentage of the remainder of the system’s mass is located in the eight solitary planets that...
![An Astronomer\](/media/gallery/spitzer-space-telescope-sirtf/thumbs/thumbs_746643main_pia17008_full.jpg "An Astronomer\")
