Astronomers Catch a "Dark Comet" Red-Handed

Artist's depiction of a near-Earth asteroid with an elongated orbit. Credit - NASA/JPL-Caltech

Our ability to track and visualize small rocks in space is still improving. And occasionally we’ll find a space rock that will remind us of that fact. One such rock is detailed in a new paper, led by Davide Farnocchia of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and recently published in Nature Astronomy, where the research team discovered what they thought was a normal, run of the mill asteroid, was actually a “dark comet”.

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