Credit: NASA Science News
SOHO's 2000th comet, spotted by a Polish amateur astronomer on December 26, 2010.
Credit: SOHO/Karl Battams
The sun has just experienced a storm—not of explosive flares and hot plasma, but of icy comets.
Sundiving comets—a.k.a. "sungrazers"—are nothing new. SOHO typically sees one every few days, plunging inward and disintegrating as solar heat sublimes its volatile ices. But now an amount 25 comets has hit the Sun in only ten days. (read more)
Source: NASA/Spitzer
COSMOS-AzTEC3, is the most distant known massive "proto-cluster"
of galaxies, lying about 12.6 billion light-years away from Earth.
Image credit: Subaru/NASA/JPL-Caltech
Astronomers have uncovered a burgeoning galactic metropolis, the most distant known in the early universe. This ancient collection of galaxies presumably grew into a modern galaxy cluster similar to the massive ones seen today.
The developing cluster, named COSMOS-AzTEC3, was discovered and characterized by multi-wavelength telescopes, including NASA's Spitzer, Chandra and Hubble space telescopes, and the ground-based W.M. Keck Observatory and Japan's Subaru Telescope.(read more)
