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Researchers observe the first known interstellar comet
To date, every comet humanity has seen inside the Solar System has come from the Solar System, whether it's the Kuiper Belt or the billions of comets believed to make up the Oort Cloud. Now, however, it looks like astronomers might have found a comet of interstellar origin. They've used Hawaii's Pan-STARRS 1 telescope to track C/2017 U1, an object with a very eccentric, hyperbolic orbit (that is, moving quickly enough to escape gravitational pull) that wasn't connected to the Sun. The trajectory suggests that it's a comet which escaped from a nearby star, rather than something knocked out a familiar path and drawn in by the Sun's gravity.
Scientists find a tailless comet from Earth's early days
It's well-established that the many asteroids and comets in the Solar System are the result of its violent early history, but finding an untouched example from the inner system is difficult. However, an astronomy team has discovered just that -- and it might shed a lot of light on our homeworld's early days. Thanks to both Pan-STARRS 1 and the Very Large Telescope, they've spotted a tailless, predominantly rocky comet (C/2014 S3) that has all the telltale signs of a "pristine" asteroid formed in the inner Solar System around the same time as the Earth, roughly 4.5 billion years ago. Its long, 860-year orbit hints that it was kicked towards the Oort Cloud (the system's extremely distant bubble of comets and other icy bodies) in the ancient past and only recently got pulled back toward the Sun.
The hunt for killer asteroids is on with the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope
The Pan-STARRS 1 telescope was unveiled on the Hawaiian island of Maui in 2007, and in early 2009, the telescope went fully online and began producing some amazing images. Now, the telescope has a nightly from dusk 'til dawn routine -- and it's looking for asteroids and comets which could threaten Earth. The PS-1, as it's known, boasts a 1,400 megapixel (that's 1.4 gigapixels!) sensor and can photograph an area about 36 times the size of the Moon in one exposure and is expected to map about one sixth of the sky per month. There's a sample shot of what the telescope's photographed below, but hit up the coverage link for many more.
