Los Angeles: The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the farthest active inbound comet ever seen, at a whopping distance of over 2.4 billion kilometres from the Sun.
Slightly warmed by the Sun, it has already begun to develop a fuzzy cloud of dust over 100,000 kilometres wide, called a coma, enveloping a tiny, solid nucleus of frozen gas and dust.
These observations represent the earliest signs of activity ever seen from a comet entering the solar system’s planetary zone for the first time.
Los Angeles: The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted the farthest active inbound comet ever seen, at a whopping distance of over 2.4 billion kilometres from the Sun.
Slightly warmed by the Sun, it has already begun to develop a fuzzy cloud of dust over 100,000 kilometres wide, called a coma, enveloping a tiny, solid nucleus of frozen gas and dust.
These observations represent the earliest signs of activity ever seen from a comet entering the solar system’s planetary zone for the first time.
PTI