Stellary Starry Universe

To commemorate an unprecedented tripling of flybys, orbital insertions and launches to planets, comets and asteroids, NASA has declared the year ahead "The Year of the Solar System."

NASA will commemorate a quarter-century of comet discoveries and discuss upcoming comet encounters during a symposium at 9 a.m. EDT on Friday, Sept. 10, in the Knight Studio of the Newseum.

 

Large debris disks around certain stars may imply a high rate of killer comets that wipe out any chance of life forming.

Many of our own solar system’s comets are found in the Kuiper Belt, a debris-filled disk that extends from Neptune’s orbit (30 AU) out to almost twice that distance. Other stars have been shown to have similar debris disks.

“The debris is dust and larger fragments produced by the break-up of comets or asteroids as they collide amongst themselves,” says Jane Greaves of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. [...]

 

 

Source: Space.com – click here for full article

 

 

Comet Lulin is approaching Earth for a 38-million-mile close encounter later this month. The green double-tailed comet is putting on a fine show for backyard telescopes and could soon become visible to the unaided eye.

 

February 4, 2009: In 1996, a 7-year-old boy in China bent over the eyepiece of a small telescope and saw something that would change his life–a comet of flamboyant beauty, bright and puffy with an active tail. At first he thought he himself had discovered it, but no, he learned, two men named “Hale” and “Bopp” had beat him to it. Mastering his disappointment, young Quanzhi Ye resolved to find his own comet one day.

And one day, he did.

Fast forward to a summer afternoon in July 2007. Ye, now 19 years old and a student of meteorology at China’s Sun Yat-sen University, bent over his desk to stare at a black-and-white star field. The photo was taken nights before by Taiwanese astronomer Chi Sheng Lin on “sky patrol” at the Lulin Observatory. Ye’s finger moved from point to point–and stopped. One of the stars was not a star, it was a comet, and this time Ye saw it first. [...]

 

Source: Nasa Science – click here for full article