Others leave Jupiter's orbit and go back around the sun. Comets are like cats; they both have tails, and they both do precisely what they want to do." One thing comets do is crash into things.

Here's why. Asteroids and comets were formed about 4.5 billion years ago, during the earliest moments of our solar system. They orbit the sun, just as planets do. But while it takes a terrestrial ...

You have just a few weeks left to view the "comet of the century" making its 80,000-year orbit around Earth. Comet C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan–ATLAS will be visible with the naked eye from Earth until ...

What does nomenclature like C/1995 O1 mean, anyway? It's a code meant to impart knowledge about the comet's discovery and orbit. In the case of Hale-Bopp, the "C" means that the comet is on an ...

Most long-period comets pose no threat to Earth. They might appear bright in the evening or morning sky, but their orbits don't cross Earth's orbit, so there is no risk of impact. But some long ...

Tuesday marks the tenth anniversary of a huge astronomical milestone: the first and only time we have landed on a comet. The ...

The solar system is made up of the Sun (our nearest star) and the objects that orbit around it, including planets, asteroids and comets. Planets orbit the Sun in roughly circular paths ...

That you should be able to calculate the shape of the orbit. That you could in fact predict when comets come back. 'And that is exactly what he and his friend Edmund Halley set out to do.

Comet C/2024 S1 (ATLAS) is no more. On Monday (Oct. 28), the comet evaporated as it was heading toward perihelion, the closest point to the sun in its orbit. There were earlier hopes that the comet, ...