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Explanation: What does Comet Leonard look like up close? Although we can't go there, imaging the comet's coma and inner tails through a small telescope gives us a good idea. As the name implies, the ion tail is made of ionized gas -- gas energized by ultraviolet light from the Sun and pushed outward by the solar wind. The solar wind is quite structured and sculpted by the Sun's complex and ever changing magnetic field. The effect of the variable solar wind combined with different gas jets venting from the comet's nucleus accounts for the tail's complex structure. Following the...

The rumor that the Netflix film, Don’t Look Up, is an allegory about climate change is true. Writer/director Adam McKay, a self-declared democratic socialist and Bernie fan, has admitted as much. In fact, McKay calls climate change “the biggest story in 66 million years. It’s the biggest story in the history of upright apes.” That much acknowledged, my skeptical friends on the right have found the film much more amusing than those on the left. My only question is whether McKay is Bernie Bro’ enough to have intended that outcome. Spoiler alert: Don’t Look Up tells the story of a...

Explanation: This picture was supposed to feature a comet. Specifically, a series of images of the brightest comet of 2021 were being captured: Comet Leonard. But the universe had other plans. Within a fraction of a second, a meteor so bright it could be called a fireball streaked through just below the comet. And the meteor's flash was even more green than the comet's coma. The cause of the meteor's green was likely magnesium evaporating from the meteor's pebble-sized core, while the cause of the comet's green was likely diatomic carbon recently ejected from the comet's city-sized nucleus. The images...

This video discuss the possible reaction with Comet Leonard and Venus tonight, (12/17) and 12/18... The first 12 minutes is where the key information is.

BREAKING: Source Provided Video and Texts Show @CNN Producer Fantasizing About Sex Acts with Fiancé’s Young Daughter Producer in question also solicited explicit photos of source’s underage daughter SOURCE: "People with power seem to get away with it”

Paris (AFP) - The Solar System has at least two more planets waiting to be discovered beyond the orbit of Pluto, Spanish and British astronomers say. The official list of planets in our star system runs to eight, with gas giant Neptune the outermost. Beyond Neptune, Pluto was relegated to the status of "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, although it is still championed by some as the most distant planet from the Sun. In a study published in the latest issue of the British journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, researchers propose that "at...

This year, the Eta Aquarids meteor shower runs April 19th to May 28th, peaking May 5th just before morning twilight. The Eta Aquarids are visible all across the globe but are more pronounced in the Southern Hemisphere sky. It is there that the Eta Aquarids can produce up to 20 to 40 meteors per hour. In the mid-northern latitudes, the count is closer to 10 meteors per hour. There is an opportunity to see a few meteors late evening (post-sunset on May 4th) as this is when “earthgrazers” are best seen. Earthgrazers tend to be fewer in quantity but are...

Eta Aquarids have a most interesting lineage. Unlike some of the other annual meteor displays whose history can be traced back for many centuries, the Eta Aquarids were not "officially" discovered until the late 19th century. In 1870, while sailing in the Mediterranean Sea, Lt. Col. G.L. Tupman sighted 15 meteors on the morning of April 30, and another 13 a few mornings later. All the meteors Tupman sighted appeared to emanate from the constellation of Aquarius. Then in 1876, professor Alexander Stewart Herschel pointed out that the orbit of Halley’s comet nearly coincided with Earth's orbit around May 4,...

Explanation: Sweeping through northern predawn skies, on November 24 Comet Leonard (C/2021 A1) was caught between two galaxies in this composite telescopic image. Sporting a greenish coma the comet's dusty tail seems to harpoon the heart of NGC 4631 (top) also known as the Whale Galaxy. Of course NGC 4631 and NGC 4656 (bottom, aka the Hockey Stick) are background galaxies some 25 million light-years away. On that date the comet was about 6 light-minutes from our fair planet. Its closest approach to Earth (and even closer approach to Venus) still to come, Comet Leonard will grow brighter in December....

Comet Leonard, also known as C/2021, will make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 12, according to NASA. EarthSky describes C/2021 A as “likely to be 2021’s best comet, and its brightest comet by year’s end.” Leonard is actually already visible in the sky and can be seen the first two weeks of December in the east before the sun rises. NASA says you can spot it by looking between the Big Dipper’s handle and Arcturus, the latter of which is one of the brightest stars in the night sky. Then, as Leonard makes its closest encounter with our...

The Early History of humansSince the olden days, humans have looked up in the sky and blamed astronomical events for the unpleasant things happening to them (which was purely a coincidence). Not only this, but humans had also praised the occasions when a good thing happened after a few astronomical sightings (which was also coincidental). I am talking about the events that include sighting a comet, meteor shower or Northern lights, and even novas. In the 15th century, Pope Callixtus III excommunicated comets as an ‘Instrument of the Devil’. In 1835-36, when Halley’s Comet arrived, people assumed that it had...

Five billion years ago, the universe was Earth-less. It remained that way till a vast number of asteroids smashed together and compacted into a giant rocky orb. But that raises a question: The Earth's surface is 70% water, so where'd the liquid come from? A long-standing theory is that a water-rich class of asteroids, called carbonaceous or C-type asteroids, could've pelted the Earth during its creation and brought along water. There's a caveat though, and the C-type asteroids may be only half the story....

Explanation: This high cliff occurs not on a planet, not on a moon, but on a comet. It was discovered to be part of the dark nucleus of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (CG) by Rosetta, a robotic spacecraft launched by ESA that rendezvoused with the Sun-orbiting comet in 2014. The ragged cliff, as featured here, was imaged by Rosetta in 2014. Although towering about one kilometer high, the low surface gravity of Comet CG would likely make it an accessible climb -- and even a jump from the cliff survivable. At the foot of the cliff is relatively smooth terrain dotted with...

The Apollo-class asteroid, called 3361 Orpheus, is 984 feet wide and is travelling at around 18,000 miles per hour. NASA will be keeping a close eye on the huge space rock, which has made it onto the space agency's 'Close Approach' list. But there's no need to panic just yet – the asteroid will pass through a distance of 3.5 million miles from our home planet. Anything that passes within 120 million miles is considered a Near Earth Object (NEO), a term used to describe "comets and asteroids that have been nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets into...

Explanation: Returning along its 6.4 year orbit, periodic comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) is caught in this telescopic frame from November 7. Sweeping past background stars in the constellation Gemini the comet's dusty tail stretches toward the upper right to Upsilon Geminorum. Also known as Pollux, Beta Geminorum, Gemini's brightest star, shines just off the upper left edge of the field-of-view. Churyumov-Gerasimenko reached its 2021 perihelion or closest approach to the Sun on November 2. At perigee, its closest approach to planet Earth on November 12, this comet was about 0.42 astronomical units away, though it remains too faint to be seen...

Comet 67P, which famously hosted the first-ever cometary lander in 2014, made its closest approach to Earth on Friday (Nov. 12). The comet, which is now bright enough to observe with amateur telescopes, will not come back to our planet for the next 200 years. During its closest pass at 7:50 pm EST (0050 GMT), Comet 67P was at a distance of 39 million miles (62.8 million kilometres) from our planet, within the orbit of Mars, according to Astronomy Now. Nine days earlier, the comet passed perihelion, the closest point to the sun in its elliptical orbit around our star....

...Oumuamua took the world by storm in October 2017 when it was identified as the first known visitor from another star system. A pair of Harvard scientists suggested the long and thin object was a spacecraft, sparking a frantic flurry of scans by astronomers as it flew by.... ...Perhaps strangest of all was that the object appeared to accelerate on its journey, suggesting it was powered by something.... The new study lines up with research published last year....

Around 12,000 years ago, something scorched a vast swath of the Atacama Desert in Chile with heat so intense that it turned the sandy soil into widespread slabs of silicate glass. Now, a research team studying the distribution and composition of those glasses has come to a conclusion about what caused the inferno. In a study published in the journal Geology, researchers show that samples of the desert glass contain tiny fragments with minerals often found in rocks of extraterrestrial origin. Those minerals closely match the composition of material returned to Earth by NASA's Stardust mission, which sampled the particles...

Composite image of Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter. Credit: Jupiter from Juno: NASA/SwRI/MSSS/Gerald Eichstädt/Seán Doran; Saturn from Cassini: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute; Uranus and Neptune from HST: NASA/ESA/A. Simon (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), and M.H. Wong and A. Hsu (University of California, Berkeley). ========================================================================================== Mushballs – giant, slushy hailstones made from a mixture of ammonia and water – may be responsible for an atmospheric anomaly at Neptune and Uranus that has been puzzling scientists. A study presented by Tristan Guillot at the Europlanet Science Congress (EPSC) 2021 shows that mushballs could be highly effective at carrying ammonia deep into the...