By Ron Cowen
A comet discovered last January just can’t keep itself together. Ever since astronomers first spied the object, dubbed C/2001 A2, it’s been breaking up.
The first sign that the comet might be undergoing some kind of upheaval came in March, when the body suddenly brightened. Brightening is often a sign of a cometary breakup, which exposes new surfaces to sunlight and vents trapped ice and gas that are then illuminated by the sun.
Observations in early April revealed that the comet had split in two. By mid-May, images taken with one of the quartet of 8.2-meter telescopes, known as the Very Large Telescope, in Paranal, Chile, revealed that one of the two halves had itself split in half. Researchers reported the finding in a May 17 circular of the International Astronomical Union (IAU).