A comet so massive that it was initially misidentified as a dwarf planet is on its way in from the outer Solar System.

There’s no need to be concerned; C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), as the comet is known, will pass just outside Saturn’s orbit. However, its large size and close proximity will provide a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study a pristine object from the Oort Cloud and learn more about the formation of the Solar System.

“We have the privilege of having discovered perhaps the largest comet ever seen – or at least larger than any well-studied one – and caught it early enough for people to watch it evolve as it approaches and warms up,” co-discoverer and astronomer Gary Bernstein from the University of Pennsylvania said earlier this year.

SAN FRANCISCO – Launchspace Technologies Corp., a company developing technology to capture orbital debris, is the latest space startup to seek funding on an equity crowdfunding platform.

As of Oct. 2 LaunchSpace had raised $58,351 at a valuation of nearly $49 million on Netcapital.

On the Netcapital site, LaunchSpace is heralding its recent grant from the nonprofit Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS) to support its plan to test technology for collecting orbital debris on the International Space Station.

The gargantuan comet will strafe Saturn’s orbit in 2031. Scientists are stoked.

UNLV researchers and colleagues may have identified the first known planet to orbit three stars.

Unlike our solar system, which consists of a solitary star, it is believed that half of all star systems, like GW Ori where astronomers observed the novel phenomenon, consist of two or more stars that are gravitationally bound to each other.

But no planet orbiting three stars—a circumptriple orbit—has ever been discovered. Perhaps until now.

BERLIN (AP) — A joint European-Japanese spacecraft got its first glimpse of Mercury as it swung by the solar system’s innermost planet while on a mission to deliver two probes into orbit in 2025.

The BepiColombo mission made the first of six flybys of Mercury at 11:34 p.m. GMT (7:34 p.m. EST) Friday, using the planet’s gravity to slow the spacecraft down.

After swooping past Mercury at altitudes of under 200 kilometers (125 miles), the spacecraft took a low resolution black-and-white photo with one of its monitoring cameras before zipping off again.

Etienne Léopold Trouvelot sketched the cosmos for Harvard. His pastels capture solar flares, eclipses, star clusters, and Jupiter’s biggest storm.

The BepiColombo spacecraft has its first high-speed encounter with the innermost planet of the Solar System.