Early in our Solar System’s history, bits of icy debris were scattered and then gradually coaxed into a spiral alignment in ...

The comet was first discovered by astronomers using the wide-field survey camera at the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) in early March last year. The long-period comet has brightened since then ...

Robert Bailey Conover, Wisconsin Great question! Assuming you're referring specifically to the orbital period - in other words, how long comets take to make one revolution around the Sun ...

Beautifully captured against a starry sky, Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) — dubbed by some as the "Great Comet of 2025" — shines brightly after its last approach to the sun for hundreds of thousands of years ...

On average, 10 long-period and 20 short-period comets cross Earth's orbit each year. Short-period comets orbit the Sun in less than 200 years and exist in the Kuiper Belt just beyond Neptune ...

The identity of this presumed cloud is not fully known, but scientists strongly believe that it is a source of long-period comets (LPCs) that enter the inner solar system from time to time and can ...

Occasionally, some wayward gravitational perturbation will knock one of them a weird way and create a long-period comet, which might briefly delight us lowly humans by providing something ...

Most of our evidence for it comes from long-period comets — "snowballs" of ice and dust punted from the cloud to orbit around the sun by gravitational perturbations. To better understand what ...

This distant zone, known as the Oort Cloud, remains unseen, but its existence is inferred from the long-period comets that occasionally journey inward. Now, a new model suggests that the inner ...