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 ...

How do you find a comet that could pose a threat to Earth but hasn't passed our planet in the last 200 years or more? You look for its footprint.

Most of the long-period comets in the Solar System come from the outer Oort Cloud. The inner region is much more stable. It's ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...