NASA’s Hubble telescope spots K1 comet exploding into fragments, space agency says

NASA’s Hubble telescope captured an “extraordinarily” rare moment of a comet exploding into fragments, the space agency said.

The comet K1, whose full name is C/2025 K1 (ATLAS), was caught fragmenting into at least four pieces between Nov. 8 and Nov. 10, NASA announced Wednesday.

The blue-hued space shards were seen surrounded by a “fuzzy envelope of gas and dust” that envelops the comet’s icy nucleus in the ground-breaking telescopic images.

“Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama, 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 images were taken just a month after K1, which is roughly five miles long, made its closest approach to the sun — at roughly one-third the distance the Earth is from the life-sustaining star.

During the phenomenon, a comet experiences intense heating and is at maximum stress. Comets like K1 tend to break apart after entering this phase, experts explained.

“The chance of that happening while Hubble watched is extraordinarily minuscule,” NASA wrote in a statement.

Noonan had no clue that K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the telescope’s miraculous images a day later.

“While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one,” said Noonan. “So we knew this was something really, really special.”

It is “very difficult” to schedule Hubble to see a comet shattering, researchers added.

“The irony is now we’re just studying a regular comet, and it crumbles in front of our eyes,” principal investigator and professor in Auburn University’s Department of Physics, Dennis Bodewits, said in a statement.

“Comets are leftovers of the era of solar system formation, so they’re made of ‘old stuff’—the primordial materials that made our solar system.”

“But they are not pristine—they’ve been heated; they’ve been irradiated by the Sun and by cosmic rays. So, when looking at a comet’s composition, the question we always have is, ‘Is this a primitive property or is this due to evolution?’ By cracking open a comet, you can see the ancient material that has not been processed.”

K1 is now a collection of fragments floating roughly 250 million miles away from Earth in the constellation Pisces. It is not likely to return, researchers said.

The announcement comes as a rare daytime meteor streaked across the sky in northeast Ohio this week, creating a massive boom that was heard as far away as New York.