A week ago, we reported that the European space agency’s Herschel Space Telescope had studied the water signature of a nearby comet and found it to be the same as the water in Earth’s oceans. Then, a few days later, we learned of a discovery by the Spitzer telescope that comets had been found swarming through a distant solar system. And shortly after that, Herschel was back in the news for its discovery of vast reservoirs of water around a young … Continue reading →
Data returned to Earth by the Spitzer space telescope suggests that the solar system around northern star Eta Corvi not only has comets, but that they are currently swarming in huge numbers and possibly raining down violently on whatever planets may be orbiting close to the star. Eta Corvi is a bright star in the constellation Corvus (The Crow), and Spitzer recently observed that it had a bright ring of dust, at about the same distance as Earth is from the … Continue reading →
One of the mysteries of the formation of the Earth is where it got its oceans from. One popular theory is that, in the early years after the Solar System‘s formation when the inner planets were heavily bombarded with leftover material (we can still see the results in the scarred, cratered face of the Moon), Earth would have been pelted with comets. According to the theory, water ice from these comets would have vapourised and condensed into the water we … Continue reading →
The Comettes are a normal French family, with a home in Paris’ southern suburbs. While they were on their summer holidays, a chondritic meteorite fell from the sky onto their roof, smashing through a tile and embedding itself into the insulation. Some time later, when the family noticed that the roof had started leaking during the rain, they called in a contractor who was astonished by what he’d found. He said “You’d have to be superman to break a roof … Continue reading →
In case you’re not up to speed on this, one of the stranger discoveries made by the Hubble Space Telescope is that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. According to everything we know about physics, this is impossible because the only force which operates over large (astronomically speaking) distances is gravity, and gravity only ever attracts. Gravity should be pulling the universe back towards itself, so the expansion should be slowing down. Nevertheless, the data show acceleration which means … Continue reading →
