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Comets rush through the solar system at up to 150,000 miles per hour, making it extremely difficult to actually land a space probe on one of them. The solution? NASA is working on something new, awesomely called a "comet harpoon." More »
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NASA recently observed a cosmic explosion, and nobody knows what it was. Actually, that's not exactly true: there are actually two equally good, utterly different explanations. It was either a collision in our galaxy...or a supernova billions of light-years away. More »
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We recently discovered the first direct evidence of comets bringing water to alien planets, and now we can go one step further. The planetary disk around the star TW Hydrae has enough water in it to support thousands of oceans. More »
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The Eta Corvi solar system is like a window into how our own solar system looked billions of years ago. All of Eta Corvi is being bombarded by giant comets — the exact same process that created Earth's oceans. More »
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What you see in this amazing video really is just a coincidence. A comet smashed into one side of the Sun just as a massive explosion ignited on the other side. Two entirely unrelated events...but they sure look awesome together. More »
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Where Earth got its oceans is a big question, and the currently preferred explanation is that ancient comets brought in huge amounts of water from the outer solar system. That hypothesis just received some big evidence to back it up. More »
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Comet Garrard is blasting through the northern sky. Of course, it's easy to lose track of one little comet when it's passing through a giant star cluster. But no matter: you just have to look for the brightest, greenest one. More »
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Comets will occasionally come a little too close to the Sun and crash into a fiery oblivion, but until now we had never been able to see it as it happened (though there have been some fake comet-smashes-the-sun videos circulating online). Witness the last moments of a sun-grazer comet. Blink and you may miss it - look at the photo below to see where the comet enters the frame. More »
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You may know that Superman owns a menagerie of superpowered sentient pets. But did you know that these animals have a long history of behaving like lunatics? Let's remember the time Krypto got Space Rabies. More »
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If you're hungry for apocalyptic images (and who isn't?) I recommend this video, of a comet spotted by an amateur astronomer earlier this month as it smashed dramatically into the sun. That's right, even a wee comet made of nothing but ice and rock can cause a giant flame to leap from the sun's surface as it hits. More »
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In 2005, NASA's Deep Impact probe shot an 800-pound subsidiary probe into the comet Tempel 1. Now, six years later, the new Stardust probe has returned to the comet to see our handiwork. But this isn't just about proving humanity can leave its mark anywhere in the cosmos - the artificially created crater kicked up valuable data about what's inside the comet's core. More »
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At the furthest edges of our solar system lies the vast Oort Cloud, a hypothetical giant shell full of billions of frozen comets. Formed 4.5 billion years ago, the cloud is a frozen museum of the chemistries of neighboring stars. More »
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Ancient Greek texts reveal the earliest recorded sighting of the solar system's most famous comet 2,500 years ago. Since then, Halley's Comet has repeatedly cameoed in history, getting credit for toppling armies, birthing empires, and even killing Mark Twain. More »
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Didn't get a chance to see this week's Perseid meteor shower? Amateur and professor astronomy photographers have captured images of the shooting meteors from all over the world. More »
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Dinosaurs may not have been Earth's only creatures to face extinction from above. A team of researchers has found evidence that suggests a comet once hit North America, taking the continent's mammals down with it. More »
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Yesterday, an amateur astronomer noticed that a large black spot had appeared near Jupiter's Southern pole. These first pictures of the phenomenon are prompting many to speculate that a passing comet or asteroid struck the gas giant. More »
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Comet Lulin won't be smashing into Earth, but it's going to swing by so closely in late February that you'll be able to see it with binoculars - and maybe even your naked eyes. More »
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Many astronomers regard Jupiter as Earth’s bodyguard, diligently attracting and smashing foreign bodies that could collide with Earth. But new simulations suggest that Jupiter’s role in the solar system may not be so beneficial. In fact, the gas giant may just have it in for the inner planets, including our own. More »
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Mars isn't the only planet with awe-inspiring craters. Here on Earth, we've been pummeled by space rocks in the not-so-distant past, and our planet has the scars to prove it. A new photo essay in National Geographic by Stephen Alvarez tells the story of planetary impacts like this one (above) in Arizona, U.S., called simply Meteor Crater. It's almost a mile wide. Check out an even more awesome one below. More »
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One hundred years ago today, June 30th, 1908, a great explosion rained Hell over Siberia, flattening 830 square miles of forest. Easily big enough to destroy a city, the 30-meter diameter space rock missed Moscow by about 4 hours. And it will happen again. But even as we track the objects headed our way in the next century, the flood of media hype over the centennial this past week shows there are still some major mysteries about the Russian blast that need solving. More »
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When it comes to comet impacts, the denizens of Earth may be living on borrowed time. Of course, comets are only about half the problem — there are plenty of asteroids whizzing around the inner solar system too — so we decided to have a look and see just how close modern society has come to destruction since 1900, and how close we're going to come over the next 100 years. The answers, provided in our nifty infographic, aren't reassuring. More »
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It's high time Earth got smacked with a comet. These firey globs of doom tend to come in cycles, raining down on our planet about once every 36 million years. Using a computer simulation of how our solar system moves through the Milky Way, astrobiologists at the UK's Cardiff University found that we pass through the densest part of the galaxy every 35 to 40 million years — they call it a "bounce." It turns out that comet impacts on Earth follow a similar cycle, increasing in frequency just about every 36 million years, give or take. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=386969&view=rss&microfeed=true Astronomers were warning an asteroid (a comet?) was due to swerve closer to Earth than any large object since the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs — in just a few days. They were all set to issue an "emergency email" and start going on television telling people not to panic too much. At the last minute, they realized it was just the Russian space probe Rosetta, on a scheduled swing past Earth to use our gravity to gain speed. Oops! More »
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