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Astronomers have captured the best and closest image to date of interstellar comet 2I/Borisov, a visitor that originated from outside of our solar system and is currently passing through. On Sunday, the comet will pass within 190 million miles of Earth on its closest approach before continuing on through our solar system. As it gets closer to Earth, the icy comet is shedding more gas and dust through its tail through evaporation. Astronomers at Yale University used the W.M. Keck Observatory's Low-Resolution Imaging Spectrometer, located in Hawaii, to provide the closest look at the interstellar comet since it was first...

Astronomers expect that this year’s Alpha Monocerotid meteor shower will be an epic outburst with possible rates of up to 400 shooting stars an hour. ================================================================= Sky-watchers may get to see 2019 really go out with a bang, with the expected arrival this week of an explosion of shooting stars. If astronomers’ predictions hold true, the Alpha Monocerotid meteor shower could come to life in dramatic fashion on November 21 and 22, with possible rates of up to 400 shooting stars an hour during its relatively brief peak. Such an outburst would make this shower at least four times more...

From the tallest peak in Hawaii to a high plateau in the Andes, some of the biggest telescopes on Earth will point towards a faint smudge of light over the next few weeks. The same patch of sky will draw the attention of Gennady Borisov, an amateur astronomer in Crimea, and many other hobbyists who will sacrifice proper sleep and doze through their day jobs rather than miss this golden opportunity. What they’re looking for is a rare visitor that is about to make its closest approach to the Sun. After that, they have just months to grab as much...

Hubble Space Telescope. The workhorse telescope has given us a photo of the new interstellar comet 2I/Borisov... 2I/Borisov has wandered into our Solar System from the deep cold of interstellar space, but nobody knows from whence it came, or how long it’s been travelling. Boris only the second object we’ve observed that’s come into our Solar System from somewhere else in the galaxy, and the Hubble snapped photos of it speeding along at about 177,000 kph (110,000 mph.) So far, the Hubble images are the sharpest ones yet. Comets contain a lot of water ice and other volatiles. When they...

An Astronomer has released our best and sharpest look to date at Comet Borisov, the second ever-known interstellar object to visit our solar system, using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to capture the new image. The comet was travelling at around 110,000 miles per hour when University of California Los Angeles astronomer David Jewitt studied it on October 12, 2019, when it was 260 million miles away. The comet — which is named after the Crimean astronomer who discovered it — will pass within around 177,000 miles (285,000 kilometres) of the Earth in early December this year. It is trailing behind...

C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) this summer provided renewed opportunities to study material left by outgassing. Using data gathered by the William Herschel Telescope (WHT), an international team of astronomers found that 2I/Borisov contains cyanide. Since comets and asteroids are essentially material left over from the formation of a planetary system, these studies will allow scientists to place constraints on the physical and chemical processes involved in the formation of extrasolar planets. Basically, it's like being able to study extrasolar planets without having to go there physically. Prof. Fitzsimmons told Universe Today, materials from other planetary systems, delivered to our doorstep—or at...

A MYSTERIOUS object hurtling towards our Solar System may be an alien spacecraft. That's the shock claim made by one space scientist, who has exclusively revealed to The Sun that our incoming visitor could be piloted by hyper-intelligent beings. Last week, scientists in Germany announced they had spotted a distant object heading in our direction. Dubbed "C/2019 Q4", the high-speed body appears to be on a path originating from another star system that will see it fire past Mars in October. Despite numerous attempts to study C/2019, scientists remain clueless as to what it is. Many speculate the distant mass...

A comet first spotted by a Ukrainian amateur astronomer looks to be just the second known object to visit our cosmic neighborhood from beyond the solar system. What could be an even bigger deal is that this one was discovered as it's still approaching us. The comet was found by Gennady Borisov of Crimea on Aug. 30, and went by the temporary name GB00234 until very recently. After being watched by several other observatories over the past few weeks, it was given the official name of C/2019 Q4 (Borisov) by the Minor Planet Center on Wednesday. It appeared to follow...

Explanation: The Big Dipper is an easy to recognize, well-known asterism in northern skies, though many see the Plough or Wagon. Famous bright nebulae of the north can also be found along its familiar lines, highlighted in this carefully composed scene with telescopic insets framed in the wider-field skyview. All from Messier's catalog, M101 and M51 are cosmic pinwheel and whirlpool on the left, spiral galaxies far beyond the Milky Way. To the right, M108, a distant edge-on spiral galaxy is seen close to our galaxy's own owl-faced planetary nebula M97. Taken on January 16, the wider-field view seems to...

The first of the new large near-Earth asteroid discoveries is named 2013 UQ4, and it is perhaps the most unusual. This approximately 19-kilometer (12-mile) wide object was spotted by the Catalina Sky Survey on Oct. 23 when the asteroid was 435 million kilometers (270 million miles) away from Earth. Not only is this object unusually large, it follows a very unusual highly inclined, retrograde orbit about the Sun, which means it travels around the Sun in the opposite direction of all the planets and the vast majority of asteroids. The only objects usually found in retrograde orbits are comets, which...

On Sunday, Dec. 16, the comet known as 46P/Wirtanen will make one of the 10 closest comet flybys of Earth in 70 years, and you may even be able to see it without a telescope. Although the approach will be a distant 7.1 million miles (11.4 million kilometers, or 30 lunar distances) from Earth, it's still a fairly rare opportunity. "This will be the closest comet Wirtanen has come to Earth for centuries and the closest it will come to Earth for centuries," said Paul Chodas, manager of the Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in...

The comet 46P/Wirtanen, which passes Earth every 5.4 years, was one of three comets discovered by Carl Wirtanen in 1948 at the Lick Observatory in California. This orbit will be one of the closest comet orbits to Earth since the 1950s, according to Space.com. The comet 46P will likely not have a large observable tail because of its relatively small size, according to Space.com. It measures 0.68 miles in diameter, one-tenth the size of the popular Halley's Comet. Currently, 46P is a small blueish object in the night sky. The comet will be passing in the Southern sky, near the...

The...wave is thought to form as the lower atmosphere flows over mountains on Venus' surface. ... Just after entering orbit around Venus in 2015, the Akatsuki orbiter observed a bow-shaped feature in the upper atmosphere over several days. Curiously, the bright structure - which stretched for 10,000km - remained stationary at the altitude of Venus' cloud tops. This is difficult to reconcile with what we know about Venus' thick upper atmosphere, in which clouds streak by at 100 metres per second (m/s). The clouds travel much faster than the slowly rotating planet below, where a Venusian day lasts longer than...

A scientific paper led by two researchers at Harvard University made a splash this week by claiming that a cigar-shaped rock zooming through our solar system may have been sent by aliens. The researchers noted in a pre-print of the article that it was an “exotic scenario,” but that “Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.” Oumuamua, the first interstellar object known to enter our solar system, accelerated faster away from the Sun than expected, hence the notion that some kind of artificial sail that runs on sunlight — known as...

Blue asteroids are rare, and blue comets are almost unheard of. An international team led by Teddy Kareta, a graduate student at the University of Arizona's Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, investigated (3200) Phaethon, a bizarre asteroid that sometimes behaves like a comet, and found it even more enigmatic than previously thought. Phaethon sets itself apart for two reasons: it appears to be one of the "bluest" of similarly colored asteroids or comets in the solar system; and its orbit takes it so close to the Sun that its surface heats up to about 800 degrees Celsius (1,500 degrees Fahrenheit), hot...

Scientists have uncovered the truth about a mysterious space rock called Oumuamua which has been hurtling through Earth’s solar system and was spotted last year.A group of acclaimed astronomers, including members from NASA, the European Space Agency and the German Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, released a report this week on the origins of the cigar-shaped asteroid which was first observed in October 2017. The name Oumuamua is Hawaiian for “messenger from afar arriving first” and was named by the site who first spotted it. According to the report, “a fast moving object on an unbound orbit was discovered close...

A 'death comet' will pass earth November 11 about 24million miles away It last showed itself on Halloween 2015 about 302,000 miles away from earth The comet has a human skull face and has been dubbed the Halloween asteroid The comet's next closest visit will occur on November 1, 2088 A 'death comet' will be zipping passed earth just after Halloween this year. The asteroid with a skull-like face will make its second trip near earth in three years after flying a worrisome 302,000 miles from our planet on October 31, 2015. This year, the comet will be a much...

Want to see a comet whizzing by Earth? A great chance to catch one of these celestial visitors is overnight tonight, when Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner will be best visible in binoculars or a telescope. The comet, also known as "21P," will make its closest approach to Earth at around 2:30 a.m. EDT Monday (630 GMT). The bright-green comet should reach a visual magnitude of 6.5 to 7, according to EarthSky.org. This makes 21P almost bright enough to see with the naked eye — but not quite. [Bright Comets of 2018: When, Where and How to See Them] To find Comet 21P...

More than 200 people across Missouri and seven other states spotted a fireball meteor last night light as it lit up the Midwestern sky, KMOV reports. The American Meteor Society posted observer accounts and several videos of the sighting to its website Tuesday. "It was super bright..." said Lisa B. in Ellisville, Missouri, who filed a report with the group. "We said, what IS that?!? Omg it's a fireball, I have to get my camera. Then tried to open my camera and the trail was all that was left." Some observers said the meteor appeared to break up into several...

Well made YouTube video on the relationship of Immanuel Velikovsky and the Electric Universe. Velikovsky, Hero or Villain? Plasma Cosmology Astronomy Many of the predictions made by Velikovsky have proven true... while the traditional astronomers and cosmologists are repeatedly surprised by the findings.