When you look up at the night sky, you might wonder about the celestial objects that streak through space,comets, asteroids, ...

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 ...

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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 ...