By Ron Cowen
For comets, breaking up isn’t hard to do. When these relics of ice and rock from the formation of the solar system pass close enough to the sun, the ice evaporates, creating a dramatic dusty tail. Sometimes, the stresses are strong enough to break off chunks of the comet’s nucleus.
Still, astronomers were surprised last month to discover that a comet had recently split into at least 19 pieces. The fragments of the comet, named 57P/du Toit-Neujmin-Delporte for the three astronomers who discovered the body in 1941, are strung along a 1-million-kilometer chain. The pieces appear to vary in length from a few tens of meters to a few hundred meters. Only one other known comet, Shoemaker-Levy-9, which crashed into Jupiter in 1994, has shown more fragments: 23.