Hubble catches rare view of a comet crumbling - Engadget

The comet, K1, was exiting our solar system when it started breaking up. 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 be