Since ancient times, comets have been considered special, set apart from planets and stars. Their unusual shapes, with long tails and unpredictable appearances, led to the belief that they were messengers of some divinity, often bringing bad, but ...
...) combined with carbon and other elements; the simplest of which is chloromethane. Using data captured with the ROSINA instrument on ESA’s Rosetta mission and the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, a team of astronomers...
... flyby of comet 81P/Wild in 2004, and has already been detected on comet 67P/C-G by another of Rosetta’s instruments - ROSINA (Rosetta Orbiter Spectrometer for Ion and Neutral Analysis). This detection though was of phosphorous in the gas...