Extraterrestrial water

Nature is putting on a magnificent show across the country beginning on Saturday night. The August Perseids are a shower of shooting stars that occur when the Earth passes close to the debris of comet Swift-Tuttle.

A newly discovered comet could be visible to the naked eye as it shoots past Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks for the first time in 50,000 years, astronomers have said.

The comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first spotted it passing Jupiter in March last year.

Mercury is so close to the sun and the temperature changes are extreme.

Mercury is planet which is part of our solar system. The planet takes only 88 Earth days to complete and orbits around the sun at an average distance of about 58 million kilometers.

Astronomers say they have detected a telltale trace of water on comet 2I/Borisov, the first known interstellar comet, New Scientist reported. If this is confirmed, this will be the first time water from another planetary system has been detected inside our solar system.

It will take two million years to reach K2-18b, a rocky planet orbiting in the habitable zone of red dwarf K2-18, according to Angelos Tsiaras of the University College London's Center for Space Exochemistry Data (CSED) and the leader of one of the research teams that last week detected water vapor in its atmosphere.

The Hubble space telescope has unravelled the mystery of a strange asteroid which had also been classified as a comet – and which had puzzled astronomers.

Hubble was used to image the asteroid, designated 2006 VW139, in September 2016 – and the image revealed that it’s not one, but two asteroids.

An unknown, unseen “planetary mass object” may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system, according to new research on the orbits of minor planets to be published in the Astronomical Journal. This object would be different from—and much closer than—the so-called Planet Nine, a planet whose existence yet awaits confirmation.