Recently in the comets Category

Since the orbital insertion of the Rosetta spacecraft, comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P/C-G) has been mapped by OSIRIS camera and VIRTIS spectro-imager, producing a huge quantity of images and spectra of the comet's nucleus.

Collisions of ice particles play an important role in the formation of planetesimals and comets. In recent work we showed, that CO2 ice behaves like silicates in collisions.

Ingredients regarded as crucial for the origin of life on Earth have been discovered at the comet that ESA's Rosetta spacecraft has been probing for almost two years.

Geochemists from Trinity College Dublin's School of Natural Sciences may have found a solution to a long-debated problem as to where - and how - life first formed on Earth.

Researchers have for the first time shown that ribose, a sugar that is one of the building blocks of genetic material in living organisms, may have formed in cometary ices.

The apparition of bright comets C/2012 F6 (Lemmon) and C/2014 Q2 (Lovejoy) in March-April 2013 and January 2015, combined with the improved observational capabilities of submillimeter facilities, offered an opportunity to carry out sensitive compositional and isotopic studies of the volatiles in their coma.

The presence of numerous complex organic molecules defined as those containing six or more atoms) around protostars shows that star formation is accompanied by an increase of molecular complexity.

Comet Lovejoy lived up to its name by releasing large amounts of alcohol as well as a type of sugar into space, according to new observations by an international team.

While the Rosetta spacecraft orbits the 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko comet, the Philae lander, deployed from Rosetta on November 2014, has gathered data on the surface of the comet that indicate the potential existence of prebiotic organics during the early solar system.

Our solar system, and other planetary systems, started as a disk of microscopic dust, gas, and ice around the young Sun. The amazing diversity of objects in the solar system today - the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets - was made from this primitive dust.