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Comet brightens mysteriously by a factor of a million 22:04 25 October 2007 NewScientist.com news service Maggie McKee A comet usually too faint to be seen with the naked eye has brightened by a factor of a million since Tuesday, suggesting its surface may have cracked open and expelled clouds of dust and gas. Astronomers are scrambling to observe the strange object, which is likely to fade in the coming days and weeks. Comet 17P/Holmes, which orbits the Sun every seven years on a path that takes it from the distance of Jupiter's orbit to about twice that of Earth's,...

Like a mushroom shooting out spores, a well-known comet was seen firing multiple "mini comets" that went sailing away at up to 280 miles (451 kilometers) an hour, astronomers have announced. The fragments were recently revealed in high-resolution images of comet Holmes, a relatively small body discovered in 1892 that mysteriously erupted in 2007, when the above images were taken. (Black-ringed dots moving in the images are background stars.) Over several days astronomers using the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope on Mauna Kea watched the 2.2-mile-wide (3.5-kilometer-wide) cloud of dust surrounding the comet swell to become larger than the sun. Later, closer looks...

All right, that title is a little misleading. In fact, when I first read the original press release, my skepticism alarms went off. But it's true, the amazing Comet Holmes now has a halo that's larger than the Sun. Not bad for a comet that, until three weeks ago, was just a tiny dim dirty snowball orbiting near Jupiter. Comet Holmes made its spectacular outburst on October 24, 2007. Formally dim enough to only be visible in the most powerful telescopes, it quickly brightened up to be seen with the unaided eye - even in light-polluted cities (like my very...