{"id":637353,"date":"2026-10-21T22:04:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-21T22:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/637353\/"},"modified":"2026-10-21T22:04:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-21T22:04:12","slug":"the-esas-euclid-telescope-discovered-a-new-comet-completely-by-accident","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/637353\/","title":{"rendered":"The ESA\u2019s Euclid Telescope Discovered a New Comet Completely by Accident"},"content":{"rendered":"

Approximately 40 to 70 new comets are discovered every year, most of which are found by astronomers actively looking for comets or at least new celestial bodies in general. But at least one comet discovered in 2026 doesn\u2019t have that distinction. It was discovered entirely by accident by a telescope that was not actively looking for comets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Say hello to C\/2026 S1 (Euclid)<\/a>, a brand new comet that was just discovered by the European Space Agency\u2019s Euclid space telescope. The comet is located about 1.3 billion kilometers away from Earth, which is roughly the distance between the sun and the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. It was discovered by Mikko P\u00f6ntinen of the University of Helsinki, together with the Solar System Objects Science Working Group, who were using the Euclid telescope at the time of discovery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

What makes this one weird, among the thousands of other comets humans have named, is how they found it. The group was intentionally pointing the telescope away from the elliptical plane, a band in the sky where the solar system\u2019s planets, most of its asteroids and a significant number of its comets reside. The idea was to avoid the cosmic dust and debris left behind by those celestial bodies, allowing the group to take clearer pictures of distant galaxies in deep space.\u00a0<\/p>\n

While doing this, a comet zipped through. It could have gone entirely unnoticed, but P\u00f6ntinen had written software to identify moving objects, which flagged images where the comet appeared. P\u00f6ntinen was then able to use its speed and trajectory to find it in other images and report it as a new comet.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI was excited to see my software flag a \u2018streak\u2019 smeared across several images,\u201d P\u00f6ntinen said in a statement<\/a>. \u201cFurther inspection revealed that it had a fuzzy cloud around it, indicative of an active object like a comet that is shedding dust and gas.\u201d<\/p>\n

A happy coincidence<\/p>\n

\"TheEuclid appears in imagery as a fuzzy little streak that could have gone entirely unnoticed by humans.ESA\/Euclid\/Euclid Consortium\/NASA, M. P\u00f6ntinen et al. 2026<\/a><\/p>\n

The most interesting part of C\/2026 S1 (Euclid) is undoubtedly that it was discovered by a telescope that wasn\u2019t designed to find comets on a mission that also wasn\u2019t designed to find comets.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to Bruno Altieri, archive scientist and member of the Euclid solar system team,\u00a0this is because of the way the Euclid telescope works<\/a>. It spends most of its time in a wide survey that will eventually map about one-third of the extragalactic sky, which encompasses all the planets, radiation clouds, debris clouds and other structures outside of the Milky Way galaxy.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It also employs a \u201cstep-and-stare\u201d method of mapping the cosmos, which means it \u201csteps\u201d to a spot, stares at the sky for about an hour and then moves on. That means much of what it looks at is only looked at once. Since comets are often found thanks to their movement, it\u2019s hard to identify such an object with this observation method.<\/p>\n

Euclid also conducts a deep field survey. These are zoomed-in glimpses of specific parts of space conducted periodically around the schedule of the wide survey. These parts are revisited only a handful of times per year, and that\u2019s the only reason C\/2026 S1 (Euclid) was discovered.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThis discovery is indeed a happy coincidence as few comets are expected to be discovered by Euclid,\u201d Altieri said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Straight up from the sun<\/p>\n

\"AThe comet is at the \u201ctop\u201d of its orbit currently and it\u2019s estimated to be thousands of years before it can circle back. European Space Agency<\/a><\/p>\n

Very little is known about C\/2026 S1 (Euclid) so far, as it\u2019s only been imaged a few times. There are a few things that astronomers have already gleaned from what they have seen. For starters, this is a long-period comet, which means its orbit around the sun lasts more than 200 years. The exact time hasn\u2019t been calculated, but early estimates<\/a> put it at thousands of years before it completes a full orbit.<\/p>\n

According to Altieri, that means it almost certainly came from the Oort Cloud, which is a shell of icy bodies, rocky planetesimals and other debris that surrounds the entire solar system. Comets from the Oort Cloud are referred to as \u201cnearly isotropic\u201d comets and orbit the sun from all sorts of zany angles. C\/2026 S1 (Euclid) is no different.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Space doesn\u2019t have an up or down, but if it did, C\/2026 S1 (Euclid) would be straight up<\/a> from the sun as viewed from Earth. Its sweeping orbit takes it far above the solar system before cutting between Saturn and Jupiter on its way back down. It\u2019s expected to reach perihelion \u2014 the point where it\u2019s closest to the sun \u2014 in 2027. After that, it won\u2019t be back there for thousands of years.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Joe\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJoe is a freelance journalist. It all started with a long-running affection for building his own PCs, which he did for the first time as a teenager. It evolved into a lifelong enjoyment of putting words on the internet about the subject. He’s written for CNET, PCMag, Mashable and SlashGear as a freelance writer, and worked as a Senior Editor at Android Authority for 10 years. When he’s not writing about tech and science, he’s learning the ins and outs of DIY home repair, gaming, playing his bass guitars and posting help on PC building and gaming subreddits. He is a staunch believer that orange juice should have pulp.
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\tSee full bio\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Approximately 40 to 70 new comets are discovered every year, most of which are found by astronomers actively…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":637354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[111,139,69,147],"class_list":["post-637353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=637353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/637353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/637354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=637353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=637353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=637353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}