Hubble Was Watching This Comet When the Coolest Thing Happened

In November 2025, a comet began disintegrating into pieces after a heated close encounter with the Sun. In a twist of fate, the Hubble space telescope happened to be observing the comet as it broke apart, capturing its demise in a series of images. “Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama and co-investigator of the event, said in a statement. “This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. 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 Hubble observations are detailed in a new study published in the Icarus journal. Astronomers first spotted comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), or comet K1 for short, in May 2025, a long-period comet originating from the Oort Cloud. The comet was heading toward its closest approach to the Sun on October 8, 2025, coming within 30 million miles (49 million kilometers) of our host star. The comet’s perihelion, its closest approach to the star, was inside Mercury’s orbit, about one-third the dista