Euclid, daha önce bilinmeyen ilk kuyruklu yıldızını buldu

Euclid, the European Space Agency telescope built to map galaxies and study dark matter and dark energy, has found its first previously unknown comet. The object shows up in frames captured from 16 to 24 September 2026, and the Minor Planet Center confirmed it on 8 October under the name C/2026 S1 (Euclid). The discovery was made by Mikko Pöntinen, a doctoral student at the University of Helsinki, with the Euclid Consortium’s Solar System Objects Science Working Group. Software he wrote to search for moving objects flagged a streak; he then predicted the object’s position and found it in five sets of exposures in all. A fuzzy coma suggested that the comet was active, giving off dust and gas. It is about 1.3 billion kilometres from Earth, far above the plane of the planets. Such finds are rare for Euclid because it keeps away from that plane and usually looks at each patch of sky only once.