US EditionHubble Space Telescope Captures Rare Comet Breaking Apart
Hubble captured comet C/2025 K1 fragmenting into four pieces days after perihelion, revealing clues about comet surface physics and early solar system materials.
- On March 18, 2026, NASA reported that the Hubble Space Telescope imaged Comet C/2025 K1 fragmenting into at least four pieces, with findings published in Icarus.
- On October 8, 2025, Comet C/2025 K1 reached perihelion at roughly 49 million kilometers, with intense heating likely triggering sequential fragmentation and gas-driven ejection eight days before Hubble observed it.
- Hubble took three 20-second images on Nov. 8–10, 2025 that let researchers reconstruct the breakup timeline and resolved individual fragments with distinct comas.
- Scientists now have a rare glimpse of pristine material as Comet C/2025 K1 fragments lie about 250 million miles from Earth, heading out of the Solar System and unlikely to return.
- This is the first time Hubble Space Telescope has witnessed a comet so early in breakup, capturing fragmentation by chance after original target failed and revealing K1's carbon-depleted composition.
34 Articles
34 Articles
NASA’s Hubble telescope spots K1 comet exploding into fragments, space agency says
The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), was captured fragmenting into at least four pieces — with the shards surrounded by a "fuzzy envelope of gas and dust" that envelops the comet's icy nucleus, NASA announced Wednesday.
Astronomers announced on Wednesday a cosmic stroke of luck: while using the Hubble space telescope, they captured images of a comet just as it exploded into fragments. From 8 to 10 November, the comet — known as C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), or simply K1 — erupted and fragmented into four, perhaps five, distinct pieces, each surrounded by a vaporized ice atmosphere. Earth telescopes that also observed K1 at that time could only see blurred spots of light. …
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 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 i…
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