Interstellar Comet Borisov

My team has been using Hubble to monitor the first-ever interstellar comet from October 2019 through fall 2020! See our press releases in October and December 2019, and updates below.

From Oct 2019 press release: NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has given astronomers their best look yet at an interstellar visitor – comet 2I/Borisov – whose speed and trajectory indicate it has come from beyond our solar system. Hubble photographed the comet at a distance of 260 million miles from Earth. This Hubble image, taken on October 12, 2019, is the sharpest view to date of the comet. Hubble reveals a central concentration of dust around the nucleus (which is too small to be seen by Hubble). The comet is falling toward the Sun and will make its closest approach on December 7, 2019, when it will be twice as far from the Sun as Earth. The comet is following a hyperbolic path around the Sun and will exit back into interstellar space. Comet 2I/Borisov is only the second such interstellar object known to have passed through the solar system. In 2017, the first identified interstellar visitor, an object formally named 'Oumuamua, swung within 24 million miles of the Sun before racing out of the solar system.

In March, Borisov appeared to brighten and in April we saw evidence that the nucleus was fragmenting, but it was very short-lived and did not lead to disintegration. Click on the following graphic to read the New York Times article: