Image: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU)
In a lucky turn of events, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope captured a comet as it was breaking apart, an extremely rare moment to witness.
The comet, K1 (officially named C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), not to be confused with the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS), wasn’t even the main target of the observation. The results were published in the journal Icarus.
Credits: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
Scientists had long hoped to use Hubble to observe a comet breaking up and had proposed many such observations. However, these events are very hard to predict and schedule, so they have never succeeded, until now.
“Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. “This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target—and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.”
Image: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU)
Noonan didn’t know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. “While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one. So we knew this was something really, really special.”
source NASA
Leave A Comment