Space & Spaceflight Enigmatic ‘Dark Comets’ Come in Two Distinct Types, Study Finds They look like asteroids, but act like comets. By Passant Rabie Published December 10, 2024 | Comments (8) 𝕏 ...

For the past few years, I've been studying a type of object that I called a dark comet—which could be just the culprit. In a new study my colleagues and I published in December 2024, we ...

Astronomers posed over the past decade that dark comets, or objects that resemble asteroids but move like comets, may exist. Now, scientists have found a total of 14 of them.

The comet 3I/ATLAS was discovered just as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory was gearing up to carry out its initial observations ...

Most are the crumbs of two types of comets: Jupiter-family comets from the Scattered Disk of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and long-period comets from the Oort Cloud surrounding our solar system.

Inner dark comets are smaller – typically 1,000 feet in size – and on circular orbits close to the Earth. Outer dark comets, shown in red, have longer orbits than inner dark comets, shown in gray.

FROM roiling storms, rare comets and volcanic eruptions, there is lots to see aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

The long-serving space telescope saw the third interloper to enter the solar system from beyond its limits late on Monday ...

The researchers do not claim that comets are necessary to the origin of life on Earth or any other planet, but instead they wanted to place some limits on the types of planets where complex ...

Most are the crumbs of two types of comets: Jupiter-family comets from the Scattered Disk of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and long-period comets from the Oort Cloud surrounding our solar system.

This hybrid behavior led scientists to identify it as a dark comet: an object that looks like an asteroid but acts like a comet. Now, new research has doubled the number of known dark comets and ...