Related papers: Will Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) Survive Perihelion?
Comet C/2013 US10 (Catalina) was an dynamically new Oort cloud comet whose apparition presented a favorable geometry for observations near close Earth approach (~0.93au) at heliocentric distances ~2au when insolation and sublimation of…
We investigate various short-warning mitigation scenarios via fragmentation for a hypothetical impact of asteroid 2023 NT1, a Near-Earth Object (NEO) that was discovered on July 15, 2023, two days after its closest approach to Earth on July…
Observations of the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS have revealed a strong production of gas and dust near perihelion, together with rapid brightening. The outgassing from the nucleus has led to a detectable non-gravitational acceleration. In…
In 2021 and 2022 the hydrogen comae of three long period comets, C/2020 S3 (Erasmus), C/2021 A1 (Leonard) and C/2021 O3 (PanSTARRS) were observed with the Solar Wind ANisotropies (SWAN) all-sky hydrogen Lyman-alpha camera on the SOlar and…
C/1890 F1 Brooks belongs to a group of nineteen comets used by Jan Oort to support his famous hypothesis on the existence of a spherical cloud containing hundreds of billions of comets with orbits of semimajor axes between 50 and 150…
The origin and survival of the Smith high-velocity HI cloud has so far defied explanation. This object has several remarkable properties: (i) its prograde orbit is ~100 km/s faster than the underlying Galactic rotation; (ii) its total gas…
We show that the estimates of close encounter of this comet with Mars depend on data treatment. Using the data taken in the two-year period, we derived that the comet will miss Mars on 2014 October 19 at the distance of about $140\,150\pm…
Massive stars inject mechanical and radiative energy into the surrounding environment, which stirs it up, heats the gas, produces cloud and intercloud phases in the interstellar medium, and disrupts molecular clouds (the birth sites of new…
We present studies of C/2015 D1 (SOHO), the first sunskirting comet ever seen from ground stations over the past half century. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) witnessed its peculiar light curve with a huge dip followed by a…
The solar nebula is thought to have undergone a number of episodes of FU Orionis outbursts during its early evolution. We present here the first calculations of the trajectories of particles in a marginally gravitationally unstable solar…
We present Hubble Space Telescope observations of active asteroid 313P/Gibbs (formerly P/2014 S4) taken over the five month interval from 2014 October to 2015 March. This object has been recurrently active near perihelion (at 2.4 AU) in two…
We present Hubble Space Telescope observations of a photometric outburst and splitting event in interstellar comet 2I/Borisov. The outburst, first reported with the comet outbound at 2.8 AU (Drahus et al.~2020), was caused by the expulsion…
Based on millimeter-wavelength continuum observations we suggest that the recent 'spectacle' of comet 17P/Holmes can be explained by a thick, air-tight dust cover and the effects of H2O sublimation, which started when the comet arrived at…
Context: Increasingly, Oort Cloud comets are being discovered at great distances from the Sun and tracked over ever wider ranges of heliocentric distances as observational equipment improves. Aims: To investigate in detail how the original…
Interstellar objects provide a direct window into the environmental conditions around stars other than the Sun. The recent discovery of 3I/ATLAS, a new interstellar comet, offers a unique opportunity to investigate the physical and chemical…
During the planet formation process, billions of comets are created and ejected into interstellar space. The detection and characterization of such interstellar comets (also known as extra-solar planetesimals or extra-solar comets) would…
We explore the hypothesis, that helium stars in a certain mass range can evolve to a carbon core explosion similar to what is widely accepted as an explanation for the SN I phenomenon. This should happen when their carbon-oxygen core grows…
Comet Interceptor (Comet-I) was selected in June 2019 as the first ESA F-Class mission. In 2029+, Comet-I will hitch a ride to a Sun-Earth L2 quasi-halo orbit, as a co-passenger of ESA's M4 ARIEL mission. It will then remain idle at the L2…
We present a study of planet-crossing asteroid (3200) Phaethon at three successive perihelia in 2009, 2010 and 2012, using the NASA STEREO spacecraft. Phaethon is clearly detected in 2009 and 2012, but not in 2010. In both former years,…
We present new 7mm continuum observations of Orion BN/KL with the VLA. We resolve the emission from the protostar radio Source I and BN at several epochs. Source I is highly elongated NW-SE, and remarkably stable in flux density, position…