News Planetary Science

A comet may have flipped its spin and entered into a death spiral

Gas streaming off comet 41P probably slowed it to a stop and began rotating it the other way

Observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope suggest that comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák (illustrated) reversed the direction of its spin in 2017.

NASA, ESA, CSA, Ralf Crawford/STScI

By Nikk Ogasa

For the first time, a comet may have been caught flipping its spin.

Sometime between April and December 2017, comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresák apparently started twirling in the opposite direction, astronomer David Jewitt reports in the April Astronomical Journal.