How does a 15-kilometer-wide comet, moving at 152,000 miles per hour, slip into our solar system undetected until a global ...

How do we know 3I/ATLAS, also called comet C/2025 N1 (ATLAS), is interstellar? Will it strike Earth? Can we visit it? Here ...

But other comets, like October's A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, are much more infrequent visitors. Some of these objects, born in the solar system 's outer fringes, are long-period comets (LPCs) that only ...

Short-period comets are beloved because they operate on timescales we can appreciate, albeit infrequently. Long-period comets are on another level entirely. These objects originate from the Oort ...

C/2023 A3 has generated excitement among astronomers and amateur skywatchers for being a long-period comet that takes more than 200 years to orbit the sun – or 80,000 years in this comet's case ...

C/2023 A3 has generated excitement among astronomers and amateur skywatchers because it's a long-period comet, one that takes more than 200 years to orbit the sun.

Potentially dangerous comets could be spotted many years in advance by following the meteoroid trails they leave near Earth, new research shows.

Meteoroid streams from long-period comets don’t stay perfect ribbons forever. They gradually lose their shape, due in part to the Sun’s changing position during each encounter.

The meteoroid stream of long-period comet Thatcher (white line). Each meteoroid moved on its own orbit and created a Lyrid shower meteor when it hit Earth after approaching the orbit of Earth (blue ...

"It's a very long-period comet." According to NASA, the comet originated in the Oort Cloud, which is well beyond Pluto and is thought to contain billions or trillions of pieces of space debris.

The 20th-century Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, intrigued by the long-period comets, wrote a paper on them in 1950. He noted about 20 of the comets had an average distance from the Sun that was more ...