On March 8, ALMA spotted a pair of jets blasting out of the comet's nucleus – its solid icy core. Spectrometry revealed that ...

When comet C/2024 G3 reaches perihelion, it will come within just 13.5 million kilometers of the sun—for context, Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, orbits the star at a distance of 47 ...

A comet that has taken astronomers by surprise could shine as brightly as Venus in the night sky as it passes by Earth over the next few days. Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) was spotted in April last ...

Dr Charles Schambeau, who has worked with astronomers from the University of Central Florida, said: "These results are like nothing we've seen before. "These detections enhance our understanding of ...

Chiron is peculiar for embodying some traits like an asteroid and others as a comet. William Gonzalez Sierra “All the small bodies in the solar system talk to us about how it was back in time ...

UCF researchers utilized the James Webb Space Telescope to uncover unique characteristics of (2060) Chiron, a distant "centaur" that exhibits traits of both a comet and an asteroid. These findings ...

A comet is a rock covered in ice, methane and other elements, though these orbits are much further out of our solar system. Centaurs are a combination of both, and one in particular has left ...

These discoveries are crucial for understanding how such bodies evolve over time and how they interact with their environments. Chiron's dynamic behavior—oscillating between comet-like activity and ...

Out in the blackness of space beyond Jupiter there is a wild hybrid orbiter unlike any other. It's been named Chiron and astronomers say it's a type of centaur, a half-comet-half-asteroid.

Chiron sometimes ejects gas and dust, like comets do. The researchers used JWST to try to see what that gas and dust is made of – not just what's in the space around the centaur in what is known as a ...