{"id":349139,"date":"2026-03-20T13:02:28","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T13:02:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/349139\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T13:02:28","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T13:02:28","slug":"hubble-has-seen-a-strange-comet-cracking-open-over-earth-completely-by-accident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/349139\/","title":{"rendered":"Hubble has seen a ‘strange’ comet cracking open over Earth \u2013\u00a0completely by accident"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of a comet breaking apart into tiny fragments, 400 million km (250 million miles) from Earth, completely by accident.<\/p>\n

The comet in question is C\/2025 K1 (ATLAS) \u2013 also known as K1 \u2013\u00a0which, astronomers are keen to point out, is not to be confused with the interstellar comet 3I\/ATLAS<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"CometComet C\/2024 G3 captured by NASA astronaut Don Pettit from the International Space Station, 11 January 2025<\/p>\n

What’s surprising about Hubble observing the comet breaking up is that K1 wasn’t even the original target of the space telescope’s study.<\/p>\n

Astronomers say the chances of spotting a comet breaking apart like this are incredibly slim.<\/p>\n

A frozen relic from the dawn of the Solar System<\/p>\n

Comets<\/a> are essentially frozen lumps of ice and rock. The vast majority of the comets we know about originated within our Solar System and orbit our Sun.<\/p>\n

These comets are formed from the ingredients out of which our Sun and all the planets \u2013 including Earth \u2013 formed.<\/p>\n

That makes comets frozen time capsules, and studying them can reveal a lot about what our early Solar System was like.<\/p>\n

As comets get closer to the Sun, they begin to heat up, causing their ancient ice to sublimate into gas, creating a fuzzy coma around the comet’s head and a long tail streaking behind.<\/p>\n

Scientists can study light from these gassy outflows to learn more about what the comet is made of.<\/p>\n

But sometimes the heating caused by a close approach to the Sun is too much for a comet, and causes the comet to break apart.<\/p>\n

\"ObservationsObservations of comet C\/2025 K1 (ATLAS) breaking up, as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in November 2025. Image: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
\nThe fate of C\/2025 K1 (ATLAS)<\/p>\n

“Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” says John Noonan, a research professor in the\u00a0Department of Physics\u00a0at Auburn University in Alabama, USA and co-investigator on the study.<\/p>\n

“This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target \u2013 and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.<\/p>\n

“While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one,” said Noonan. “So we knew this was something really, really special.”<\/p>\n

The team say they had tried before to use the Hubble Space Telescope to observe a comet break up before, but had never managed it.<\/p>\n

“The irony is now we’re just studying a regular comet and it crumbles in front of our eyes,” says principal investigator Dennis Bodewits, professor in Auburn University\u2019s Department of Physics.<\/p>\n

“Comets are leftovers of the era of Solar System formation, so they\u2019re made of \u2018old stuff\u2019 \u2013 the primordial materials that made our solar system,” says Bodewits.<\/p>\n

“But they are not pristine \u2013\u00a0they’ve been heated; they’ve been irradiated by the Sun and by cosmic rays.<\/p>\n

“So, when looking at a comet\u2019s composition, the question we always have is, \u2018Is this a primitive property or is this due to evolution?\u2019 By cracking open a comet, you can see the ancient material that has not been processed.”<\/p>\n

\"ObservationsImage: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
\nHow Hubble caught the break-up<\/p>\n

The Hubble Space Telescope captured comet K1 breaking up into at least four pieces, the team say, and each of those pieces had its own coma.<\/p>\n

Hubble\u2019s images were taken just a month after K1\u2019s closest approach to the Sun, when it got even closer to the Sun than the orbit of the planet Mercury.<\/p>\n

At its closest, K1 was about one-third the distance between Earth and the Sun.<\/p>\n

Because it got so close to the Sun, the comet would have undergone intense heating, scientists say, and this is the point at which many comets break up.<\/p>\n

The team say K1 was probably about 8km (5 miles) wide, which is slightly larger than normal. They estimate the comet began to disintegrate eight days before Hubble saw it.<\/p>\n

The space telescope captured three 20-second images, one on each day from 8 November to 10 November 2025. As it observed the comet, one of K1\u2019s smaller pieces also broke up.<\/p>\n

\"Artist'sArtist’s impression showing the orbit of comet C\/2025 K1 (ATLAS) in our Solar System. Illustration: NASA, ESA, Ralf Crawford (STScI)
\nWorking backwards<\/p>\n

The team say they were able to use Hubble’s observations to trace the history of the fragments back in time, to when they were one piece.<\/p>\n

But they couldn’t work out why there was a delay between when comet K1 broke up and when bright outbursts were seen from Earth.<\/p>\n

Once the internal ice of the comet was exposed, it should have reflected light and made the comet brighten instantly.<\/p>\n

The team say perhaps a layer of dust had formed over the ice, and then blew off. Or perhaps it took a while for internal heat to build up within the comet and blow of a shell of dust, to reveal the reflective ice underneath.<\/p>\n

\"ObservationsImage: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)<\/p>\n

\"ObservationsImage: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)<\/p>\n

\"ObservationsImage: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)<\/p>\n

“Never before has Hubble caught a fragmenting comet this close to when it actually fell apart. Most of the time, it’s a few weeks to a month later. And in this case, we were able to see it just days after,” says Noonan.<\/p>\n

“This is telling us something very important about the physics of what’s happening at the comet\u2019s surface. We may be seeing the timescale it takes to form a substantial dust layer that can then be ejected by the gas.”<\/p>\n

The team say the’ve still got a lot to learn about comet K1.<\/p>\n

They say studies using ground-based telescopes show the comet is ‘chemically strange’, with a lot less carbon than is normally seen in other comets.<\/p>\n

Spectroscopic studies using Hubble \u2013\u00a0i.e. analysing light from the comet \u2013 should reveal more about its chemical make-up, which in turn will give scientists more insight into the origins of our Solar System.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of a comet breaking apart into tiny fragments, 400 million km…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":349140,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[85,46,141,145],"class_list":["post-349139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=349139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/349140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=349139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=349139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=349139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}