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Explanation: Like most other sungrazing comets, Comet Lovejoy (C/2011 W3) was not expected to survive its close encounter with the Sun. But it did. This image from a coronograph onboard the sun-staring SOHO spacecraft identifies the still inbound remnants of the tail, with the brilliant head or coma emerging from the solar glare on December 16. The Sun's position, behind an occulting disk to block the overwhelming glare, is indicated by the white circle. Separated from its tail, Comet Lovejoy's coma is so bright it saturates the camera's pixels creating the horizontal streaks. Based on their orbits, sungrazer comets are...

A newfound comet defied long odds on Thursday (Dec. 15), surviving a suicidal dive through the sun's hellishly hot atmosphere, according to NASA scientists. Comet Lovejoy plunged through the sun's corona at about 7 p.m. EST (midnight GMT on Dec. 16), coming within 87,000 miles (140,000 kilometers) of our star's surface. Temperatures in the corona can reach 2 million degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 million degrees Celsius), so most researchers expected the icy wanderer to be completely destroyed.

Closest approach to be 3:28 PST Tuesday afternoon.

Check out this website: http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=2005%20YU55;orb=1;cov=0;log=0;cad=0#orb you need JAVA installed to view the app COMET YU55 It is going to cross our orbital path and almost be directly in the same line and path as Earth, right along our orbital plane and orbital location around the Sun right around November 9 People used to freak about that comet Elenin, it misses us by quite a bit, but, YU55 is very close! Many conspiracy theorists are saying the government is covering this up, that it is the end of the world, Obama knows, that Fema camps are NOT for the NOW but...

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system. The downpour resembles our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment," which may have brought water and other life-forming ingredients to Earth. During this epoch, comets and other frosty objects that were flung from the outer solar system pummeled the inner planets. The barrage scarred our moon and produced large amounts of dust. Now Spitzer has spotted a band of dust around a nearby bright star in the northern sky called Eta Corvi that...

Whenever astronomers discover a comet headed inbound toward a close encounter the Sun, there's always buzz among observers about how bright it might get. That was certainly the case last December, when Comet Elenin (C/2010 X1) made its debut. Many hoped it would become easily visible to the unaided eye as it rounded perihelion nine months later. By April, that initial enthusiasm had waned a bit, as it became clear that Comet Elenin was small and intrinsically faint. The keys to its peak visibility were the closeness it would eventually have to the Sun on September 10th (0.48 astronomical unit,...

A surprise meteor shower spotted in February was likely caused by cosmic "bread crumbs" dropped by an undiscovered comet that could potentially pose a threat to Earth, astronomers announced today (July 27). The tiny meteoroids that streaked through Earth's atmosphere for a few hours on Feb. 4 represent a previously unknown meteor shower, researchers said. The "shooting stars" arrived from the direction of the star Eta Draconis, so the shower is called the February Eta Draconids, or FEDs for short. The bits of debris appear to have been shed by a long-period comet. Long-period comets whiz by the sun very...

A stream of dusty fragments from a comet born in the outermost reaches of the solar system has hit the Earth on a path that leads astronomers to conclude the comet itself could be "potentially hazardous" if it crashes into the planet. The comet's location is unknown, making it difficult to say when it will approach Earth, but "the orbits of the dust trail tells us that the comet is on a path that could eventually hit us," said Peter Jenniskens, an astronomer at the SETI Institute and the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View. "It's very unlikely," he...

Comet ELENIN is coming, and some conspiracy theorists believe it will brng much gloom, is THIS what NASA's head guy warned us about 3 weeks ago??

Icy body may even be bright enough to be seen in the day, expert says. Astronomers stumbled upon the icy interloper on June 5 while searching for potentially hazardous asteroids. Equipped with the world's largest digital camera—1,400 megapixels—the University of Hawaii's Pan-STARRS team snagged a faint image of the odd object while it was more than 700 million miles (1.1 billion kilometers) away, between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. By March 2013 the comet, named C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS), is expected to come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of the sun—closer even than the innermost planet, Mercury. [snip]...

Remember Halley's comet? Twenty-five years ago thousands of people peered through telescopes to see it whiz by. Early Saturday morning stargazers will have the chance to see bits of the comet rain down during the annual Eta Aquarid meteor shower. Meteor showers are named after the constellation that their radiant is in, in this case -- the constellation Aquarius. The shower stems from the "water jar" near one of the constellations brightest stars, Eta Aquariid. NEWS: Did the Greeks See Halley's Comet First? The Eta Aquarids are created by bits of material from Halley's Comet as it travels through the...

A recent storm of small comets that pelted the sun could herald the coming a much bigger icy visitor, astronomers say. Since its launch in 1995, NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, orbiter has captured pictures of 2,000 comets as they've flown past the sun. Most of these comets are so-called sungrazers, relatively tiny comets whose orbits bring them so near the sun that they are often vaporized within hours of discovery. (See a picture of a sungrazer spied in October.) The sun-watching telescope usually picks up one sungrazer every few days. But between December 13 and 22, SOHO...

Cosmic Impact Site That Created Earth’s Axial Tilt and Fault Lines © Mihai Radu Draghici Abstract: Using Google Earth and browsing the geographic appearance of the Earth’s crust starting from the South Pacific Ocean right above Antarctica and traveling over to Drake’s Passage and into the South Atlantic Ocean there seems to be a visual trace that some sort of cosmic collision occurred in that area. (See Figure 1) The impact of the object surfed across the ocean and collided with the bottom of South America where it once connected to Antarctica creating Drake’s Passage opening. This impact also may...

A greenish comet named 103P/Hartley 2 flew within 11 million miles of the Earth on Wednesday, one of the closest approaches by a comet in centuries. But hardly anyone is likely to see it until a Maryland-led NASA mission sends a spacecraft past on Nov. 4. While the comet has been visible in the northern sky for weeks, it has been a difficult target for backyard stargazers, especially in light-polluted suburban skies. "This is probably one of the best comets of the year," said Armen Caroglanian, a member of an employees' astronomy club at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center....

BIG GREEN COMET: The icy nucleus of comet 103P/Hartley 2 measures no more than a couple of kilometers across. That tiny nugget, however, is surrounded by an vast atmosphere of gas more than 150,000 km in diameter--about the same size as the planet Jupiter! And it's coming our way. Amateur astronomer Nick Howes sends this picture of the approaching comet from Cherhill, WIltshire UK: "I photographed the comet on Oct. 1st using a 4-inch refractor," says Howes. "Four hours of exposure time revealed not only the comet's vast green atmosphere but also an emerging tail." Howes describes the processing of...

NASA sends spacecraft on mission to comet Hartley 2 NASA/JPL NEWS RELEASE Posted: December 15, 2007 NASA has approved the retargeting of the Epoxi mission for a flyby of comet Hartley 2 on Oct. 11, 2010. Hartley 2 was chosen as Epoxi's destination after the initial target, comet Boethin, could not be found. Scientists theorize comet Boethin may have broken up into pieces too small for detection. The Epoxi mission melds two compelling science investigations -- the Extrasolar Planet Observation and Characterization and the Deep Impact Extended Investigation. Both investigations will be performed using the Deep Impact spacecraft. In addition...

NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft flew 700 kilometers, or 435 miles, from comet Hartley 2 on Thursday morning. These five images were the first snapshots returned from the probe more than 13 million miles away from Earth. All five images were captured with Deep Impact's medium-resolution camera between 1358 GMT and 1401 GMT.

A pale green interloper among the stars of Cassiopeia, Comet Hartley 2 glows like an escapee from Krypton at the center of this exposure taken on the night of Sept. 28, 2010, by NASA astronomer Bill Cooke. Still too faint to be seen with the unaided eye, the comet was 18 million miles away from Earth at the time. Cooke took this image using a telescope located near Mayhill, N.M., which he controlled via the Internet from his home computer. "Before mid-October, Northern Hemisphere observers will be able to see the comet nearly all night long in the northeast," Cook...

A CELESTIAL event in the 5th century BC could be the earliest documented sighting of Halley's comet - and it marked a turning point in the history of astronomy. According to ancient authors, from Aristotle onwards, a meteorite the size of a "wagonload" crashed into northern Greece sometime between 466 and 468 BC. The impact shocked the local population and the rock became a tourist attraction for 500 years. The accounts describe a comet in the sky when the meteorite fell. This has received little attention, but the timing corresponds to an expected pass of Halley's comet, which is visible...

Chelsea Clinton Wedding Guest List Revealed Posted by Devon Thomas NEW YORK (CBS) It's wedding season and Hillary and Bill Clinton's daughter Chelsea has her guest list all sorted out. The First Daughter, 30, who is getting married on July 31 to Marc Mezvinsky, is throwing a wedding bash that will reportedly have up to 500 guests, including some of the biggest names in politics and entertainment. Just who made the cut? According to the Hudson Valley News, guests include President Obama, singer Barbra Streisand, filmmaker Steven Spielberg and his wife Kate Capshaw, and media moguls Oprah Winfrey and Ted...

A European spacecraft zoomed by past a mysterious asteroid Saturday to take the first-ever close look at the space rock while flying more than 282 million miles from Earth. The European Space Agency's (ESA) Rosetta space probe flew past the asteroid Lutetia, an object discovered in 1852 that appeared only as a bright speck in the sky to astronomers until today. The first new photos of the asteroid revealed Lutetia to be a lumpy rock with a potato-like appearance. Rosetta was about 1,900 miles (3,100 km) from the asteroid at its closest approach. The enigmatic space rock, which is about...

One wonders... Did the inhabitants of galaxy NGC 891 duck when Comet McNaught flew past the edge-on spiral on the morning of June 8th? Mike O'Connor and Tristan Dilapo took this picture of the cosmic close encounter from Colden, New York: (click on photo to enlarge) "The comet was only 10 degrees above the horizon," says O'Connor. "Nevertheless, we got a good picture using a 12-inch telescope and an SBIG ST9-E camera."And, no, the denizens of that distant galaxy did not flinch, flee, duck or take notice in any way. NGC 891 is 30 million light years away, far removed...

Tiny balls of fungus and feces may disprove the theory that a huge space rock exploded over North America about 12,900 years ago, triggering a thousand-year cold snap, according to a new study. The ancient temperature drop, called the Younger Dryas, has been well documented in the geologic record, including soil and ice core samples.The cool-down also coincides with the extinction of mammoths and other Ice Age mammals in North America, and it's thought to have spurred our hunter-gatherer ancestors in the Middle East to adopt an agricultural lifestyle.But the theory that a comet or asteroid explosion is behind the...

A recently discovered comet is surprising skywatchers by becoming brighter than predictions had first suggested and can now be seen with the unaided eye during the next few weeks. Comet McNaught, officially catalogued as C/2009 R1, was discovered by Australian astronomer Robert McNaught last September using the using the 0.5-meter Uppsala Schmidt telescope and a CCD camera. It's the 51st comet that bears McNaught's name. Although initially an extremely faint object, enough observations of the newfound comet were made to allow Brian Marsden of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., to calculate an orbit. Comet McNaught is expected to...

COMET McNAUGHT: A fresh comet is swinging through the inner solar system, and it is brightening rapidly as it approaches the sun. Presenting, Comet McNaught (C/2009 R1): Michael Jäger of Stixendorf, Austria, took the picture on June 6th using an 8-inch telescope. The comet's green atmosphere is larger than the planet Jupiter, while the long willowy ion tail stretches more than a million kilometers through space. These dimensions make the comet a fine target for backyard telescopes. Comet McNaught can be found low in the northeastern sky before dawn gliding through the constellation Perseus. It is brightening as it approaches...

MIAMI – A comet plunging into the sun has been captured in 3-D as it hurtled along its kamikaze path for the first time, solar physicists announced Monday. "We believe this is the first time a comet has been tracked in 3-D space this low down in the solar corona," said solar physicist Claire Raftery, a post-doctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. Four post-doctoral researchers at UC Berkeley's Space Science's Laboratory used instruments aboard NASA's Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) spacecraft to track the so-called sun-grazing comet as it approached the sun. They were able to estimate an approximate time and...

Hour-long hailstorm may have caused 1,000-year freeze, say scientists An hour-long hailstorm from space may have changed the climate of the Earth in 11,000 BC, leading to a freeze lasting more than 1,000 years, scientists say. Published: 8:00AM BST 02 Apr 2010 An hour-long hailstorm from space may have changed the climate of the Earth in 11,000 BC, leading to a freeze lasting more than 1,000 years, scientists say. A comet may well have caused the earth to freeze for over 1,000 years Photo: GETTY The catastrophe, caused by a disintegrating comet, wiped out large numbers of animal species and...

Nasa scientists are searching for an invisible 'Death Star' that circles the Sun, which catapults potentially catastrophic comets at the Earth. The star, also known as Nemesis, is five times the size of Jupiter and could be to blame for the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. The bombardment of icy missiles is being blamed by some scientists for mass extinctions of life that they say happen every 26 million years Nemesis is predicted to lie at a distance equal to 25,000 times that of the Earth from the Sun, or a third of a light-year....

At first glance it looks like aliens are using the sun for target practice. A string of bullet-shaped streaks of light appear to be shooting straight toward the sun. These are the proverbial snowballs in Hell, plunging 300 miles per second toward a fiery end in the sun's atmosphere... The wayward comets are called sungrazers. They are a class of comet that likes to live dangerously. Sungrazers can skirt within a few thousand miles of the sun's roiling photosphere. Many are torn apart or evaporate as they streak along at a blazing 1 million miles per hour. As their orbits...

While scientists don't think it's a comet, they're not exactly sure of the precise origin of the incredible object soaring some 90 million miles from Earth, snapped just a few weeks ago by the Hubble Space Telescope. "I've seen thousands of astronomical images over my career, but this is one of the few absolute jaw-droppers: A flying X-pattern with trailing streamers," said Ray Villard, a contributing writer to Discovery News. "Whatever it is, nothing quite like it has ever before been seen in the heavens." Even the experts who study celestial phenomena seem somewhat perplexed. "We're still trying to really...

No evidence of an extraterrestrial impact 13,000 years ago, studies say. An independent study has cast more doubt on a controversial theory that a comet exploded over icy North America nearly 13,000 years ago, wiping out the Clovis people and many of the continent's large animals.Sediments at the San Jon site, in eastern New Mexico, contained very low abundances of magnetic spherules said to be evidence of an impact.Vance Holliday Archaeologists have examined sediments at seven Clovis-age sites across the United States, and did not find enough magnetic cosmic debris to confirm that an extraterrestrial impact happened at that time,...

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...

"Showing that the ingredients for life in the universe may be distributed far more widely than previously thought, scientists have found traces of a key building block of biology in dust snatched from the tail of a comet. Scientists at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., have uncovered glycine, the simplest amino acid and a vital compound necessary for life, in a sample from the comet Wild 2. The sample was captured by NASA's Stardust spacecraft, which dropped it into the Utah desert in 2006. "By detecting glycine, we now know that comets could have delivered amino acids...

The amino acid glycine, a fundamental building block of proteins, has been found in a comet for the first time, bolstering the theory that raw ingredients of life arrived on Earth from outer space, scientists said on Monday. Microscopic traces of glycine were discovered in a sample of particles retrieved from the tail of comet Wild 2 by the NASA spacecraft Stardust deep in the solar system some 242 million miles (390 million km) from Earth, in January 2004. Samples of gas and dust collected on a small dish lined with a super-fluffy material called aerogel were returned to Earth...

Researchers have found shock-synthesized hexagonal diamonds on one of California's Channel Islands, which they say is the strongest evidence yet that a comet exploded in the atmosphere above North America, causing widespread extinctions there around 12,900 years ago... In 2007 researchers theorized that a comet set off continental fires that led to the mysterious disappearance of the Clovis people and the extermination of 35 mammal genera, including mammoths, mastodons, ground sloths and camels. The team documented a "black mat" of charcoal throughout North America that contains high levels of iridium, magnetic spheres, and nano-diamonds, which are consistent with such an...

"These findings are inconsistent with the alternative and already hotly debated theory that overhunting by Clovis people led to the rapid extinction of large mammals at the end of the ice age, the research team argues in the PNAS paper."

Its green, gassy, has two fins. A vintage Cadillac? No, it's Comet Lulin coming Monday tonight - astronomers, astrologers and George Noory all watching

An odd, greenish backward-flying comet is zipping by Earth this month, as it takes its only trip toward the sun from the farthest edges of the solar system. The comet is called Lulin, and there's a chance it can be seen with the naked eye — far from city lights, astronomers say. But you'll most likely need a telescope, or at least binoculars, to spot it. The best opportunity is just before dawn one-third of the way up the southern sky. It should be near Saturn and two bright stars, Spica and Regula. On Monday at 10:43 p.m. EST, it...

WASHINGTON – An odd, greenish backward-flying comet is zipping by Earth this month, as it takes its only trip toward the sun from the farthest edges of the solar system. The comet is called Lulin, and there's a chance it can be seen with the naked eye — far from city lights, astronomers say. But you'll most likely need a telescope, or at least binoculars, to spot it. The best opportunity is just before dawn one-third of the way up the southern sky. It should be near Saturn and two bright stars, Spica and Regula. On Monday at 10:43 p.m....

During the next few weeks, a fine comet bright enough for observation in binoculars and possibly even with the naked eye will provide a fine skywatching target when weather permits.Comet Lulin will be closest to Earth on Feb. 24 and will occur than and on surrounding nights. For sharp-eye viewers with dark, rural, skies, the comet is expected to be visible as a dim, fuzzy star.People living in cities and suburbs are not expected to see the comet with the naked eye, but binoculars and telescopes will reveal its cloudy head and perhaps a striking tail, too. Comets are unpredictable,...

Comet Lulin (C/2007 N3), discovered in 2007 by a Strait-bridging team of astronomers from Taiwan and China, is swinging around the sun and approaching Earth. Astronomer Karzaman Ahmad sends this picture taken Jan. 7th from the Langkawi National Observatory in Malaysia:

Abundant tiny particles of diamond dust exist in sediments dating to 12,900 years ago at six North American sites, adding strong evidence for Earth's impact with a rare swarm of carbon-and-water-rich comets or carbonaceous chondrites, reports a nine-member scientific team. These nanodiamonds, which are produced under high-temperature, high-pressure conditions created by cosmic impacts and have been found in meteorites, are concentrated in similarly aged sediments at Murray Springs, Ariz., Bull Creek, Okla., Gainey, Mich., and Topper, S.C., as well as Lake Hind, Manitoba, and Chobot, Alberta, in Canada. Nanodiamonds can be produced on Earth, but only through high-explosive detonations or...

Comet may have exploded over planet, causing fires, die-offs, researchers say A meteorite colliding with the Earth 65 million years ago is considered to be the most likely reason dinosaurs vanished from the planet. Now a team of scientists says it has found new evidence that an object from space caused a similar extinction event only 13,000 years ago. In an article to be published Friday in the journal Science, researchers present what one author calls the "smoking bullet"—proof that an exploding comet triggered the sudden, thousand-year freeze that killed off mammoths, saber-toothed tigers and other large mammals that used...

A comet orbiting our Sun may be an interloper from another star system. Comet Machholz 1 isn't like other comets. David Schleicher of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, measured the chemical makeup of 150 comets, and found that they all had similar levels of the chemical cyanogen (CN) except for Machholz 1, which has less than 1.5% of the normal level. Along with some other comets, it is also low on the molecules carbon2 and carbon3. Schleicher suggests three possible explanations. The simplest is that Machholz 1 could have formed in an extremely cold region of the solar system....

The transit method — observing a distant planet as it moves in front of its star as seen from Earth — is a prime tool for exoplanet detection. But transits are hardly limited to planets around their primaries. The Taiwanese-American Occultation Survey (TAOS) is demonstration of that, an attempt to find tiny Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) in the range between 0.5 and 28 kilometers. As you would imagine, at a distance like this such objects cannot be seen directly, but an occultation — the dimming of a star when one of the KBOs passes in front of it —...

Scientific Scenario Of A Comet's Impact With Earth And The "Wormwood Star" Prophecy by Marshall Beeber An Introduction In the First Century AD, the Apostle John wrote an apocalyptic book called "Revelation" in which he described among many "end-time" events the collision of a star called Wormwood with Earth. Revelation states: Rev. 8:10-11: The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water-- the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people...

Sun's Movement Through Milky Way Regularly Sends Comets Hurtling, Coinciding With Mass Life ExtinctionsA large body of scientific evidence now exists that support the hypothesis that a major asteroid or comet impact occurred in the Caribbean region at the boundary of the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods in Earth's geologic history. Such an impact is suspected to be responsible for the mass extinction of many floral and faunal species, including the large dinosaurs, that marked the end of the Cretaceous period. (Credit: Art by Don Davis / Courtesy of NASA) ScienceDaily (May 2, 2008) — The sun's movement through the Milky...

Meteors' mysterious origin traced to 1490 event 15:50 07 January 2008 NewScientist.com news service Stephen Battersby Last week's Quadrantid meteor shower was probably debris from a deep-space explosion that went off in the late 15th century, new observations reveal. The meteors, which return every January, were observed more closely than ever before when a group of 14 astronomers tracked them for nine hours on a flight from California, US, to the North Pole. They found that the shower peaked at around 0200 GMT on Friday, matching a prediction made by Peter Jenniskens of NASA. He based his prediction on the...

The sun is no longer the largest object in our solar system. At least for a while anyway. Comet 17P/Holmes suddenly exploded on October 23, making it a million times brighter within a few hours and causing its gas and dust cloud to expand until it was measured at 0.9 million miles across by November 9 by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. And it's still growing. The sun's diameter is about 864,900 miles. The comet should begin to shrink back to a more normal size in the near future. The...