IMAGE:Several bright, fuzzy, blue, streaking lights in a diagonal line from the upper left to the lower right of fragmenting comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS).Credits: Image: NASA, ESA, Dennis Bodewits (AU); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)
• In a happy twist of fate, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope just witnessed a comet in the act of breaking apart. The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule. The findings published Wednesday in the journal Icarus.
The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) not to be confused with interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS was not the original target of the Hubble study.
“Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. “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 and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances.”
