Latest Extinct comet Stories
By University Of Arizona CommunicationsThe extraterrestrial rock is tumbling through space alongside thousands of similar objects in our solar system's main asteroid belt, roughly between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.An asteroid discovered more than 100 years ago my not be an asteroid at all, but an extinct comet that is coming back to life, according to new observations.The night of Dec. 11, Steve Larson, senior staff scientist with the Catalina Sky Survey, was searching for potentially...
According to a team of astrophysicists, a number of the heavenly bodies drifting about in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter were previously comets that had been ejected from their orbit around planets. Their report challenges the commonly held notion that most of the asteroids are left-overs from "proto-planetary disks," or the thick gas ring that surrounds young stars.The odd make-up of the orbiting rocks has long tickled the curiosity of scientists, with their strange mixtures...
It is nothing new for the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) to discover another comet "“ it has already found more than 1350. But the latest is a bit different - SOHO had spotted it twice before.For the first time, SOHO's Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) has found a rare type of comet called a periodic comet (which flies by the Sun at regular intervals). While many SOHO comets are believed to be periodic, this is the first one that has been...
