Aug 7 2000
From The Space Library
NASA announced that the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) had located a "small armada of 'mini-comets'," the fragmented remains of the nucleus of the comet LINEAR. When it had disappeared behind the Sun on 27 July 2000, astronomers initially thought that LINEAR had disintegrated entirely. Upon losing sight of the comet's core, ground-based observers had suggested that the nucleus had disintegrated into a "pile of dust," and, consequently, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute had reprogrammed the HST to search for the nucleus. The exceptional resolution and sensitivity of the HST had revealed the nuclei of a half-dozen mini-comets at a level of detail never before observed in a disintegrating comet. Some astronomers had suggested that the fragments the HST revealed were the "primordial building blocks of the original nucleus." If so, studying them could help scientists understand how the comet had originally formed.
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