Hubble catches rare view of a comet crumbling
NASA and ESA have released new images from the Hubble Space Telescope of a comet breaking up as it exits the solar system, captured as part of study recently published in the journal Icarus. The images are notable not only because they offer a more detailed view of the inside of a comet, which could…
NASA and ESA have released new images from the Hubble Space Telescope of a comet breaking up as it exits the solar system, captured as part of study recently published in the journal Icarus. The images are notable not only because they offer a more detailed view of the inside of a comet, which could offer new information about the early days of the universe, but also because they were taken by accident.
Photographing K1, or “Comet C/2025 K1” as it’s officially known, wasn’t the original intention of the study. “This comet [was] observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal,” John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama said. “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.”
The comet broke up over a period of days into “at least four pieces,” each with a “fuzzy envelope of gas and dust” around them, with Hubble specifically capturing the disassembly from November 8 through November 10, 2025. K1 was interesting before it started to crumble because at “around 8 kilometers across” (about 5 miles), it’s larger than the average comet, and having footage of it shattering will likely offer new insights into the physics of comets in general. Additionally, the lack of carbon in the gases released by the comet as it broke is apparently “chemically very strange,” which suggests the composition of K1 could bear scientific fruit, too.
Hubble has tracked comets of different sizes and compositions for years. Studying them remains a focus because comets are frequently made of ice and rock from the primordial period when solar systems were first forming. The ESA hopes to dramatically expand our understanding of that period with its “Comet Interceptor” mission, which is supposed to launch in 2028 or 2029, and aims to use photos captured from multiple angles to create a 3D model of a comet.
