Ep. 768: Comets' Unpredictability

Astronomy Cast

Science, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Space

4.8 • 3.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 October 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Astronomy Cast Ep. 768: Comets' Unpredictability

By Fraser Cain & Dr. Pamela Gay

Streamed live on Oct 13, 2025.

So it's been decades since we've seen a bright comet in the sky. And actually there was a pair — Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake. And then, silence! And unmet promises by the Universe to give us a bright comet. Comets are unpredictable, and they arrive precisely when they intend to. Is it time again for a bright comet? If you asked us in January if 2025 was going to have any outstanding comets would fly through the Solar System, we would have (and we did) say "no." And we were wrong. Comets are fickle, unpredictable, and like to do exactly what we didn't predict.

This show is supported through people like you on Patreon.com/AstronomyCast

In this episode, we'd like to thank: Andrew Poelstra, BogieNet, Brian Cagle, Burry Gowen, David, David Rossetter, David Truog, Ed, Gerhard Schwarzer, Jason Kwong, Jeanette Wink, Michael Purcell, Olger, Sergio Sancevero, Sergey Manouilov, Siggi Kemmler, Stephen Veit

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	I'm going to Astronomycast, Episode 768, Comet unpredictability. Welcome to Astronomycast for Weekly Facts
0:56.9	Based Journey Through the Cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know, but how we know
1:01.7	what we know. I'm Frisor Kane. I'm the publisher of the universe today with me, as always, is Dr. Pamela
1:06.0	Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmast.
1:11.3	Hey, Pamela, how you doing?
1:12.5	I am doing well.
1:15.3	Our sites are still a bit on the struggle bus with the onslaught of scrapers, but I seem to have things running slow but not crashing.
1:26.7	And I'll take slow and not crashing and continue to work on it.
1:30.1	So thank you, everyone, for your patience.
1:34.8	Yeah, this was not what AI ever talks about doing the people.
1:41.4	Yeah, this is, yeah.
1:42.8	We're by Terminators.
1:44.0	I would prefer Terminators over them slowly degrading our website service.
1:50.0	Yeah.
1:50.9	Yeah, at least the Terminators are honest with you as opposed to sneakily pretending to be Chrome
1:56.7	browsers that are just browsing your website thousands of times a second.
2:00.8	Right, right.
2:01.7	So we did something unusual this week over on my YouTube channel.
2:07.4	We released, instead of doing our normal news roundup with Space Bites, we did a roundup
2:13.0	of news about Comet 3i Atlas.
2:15.5	And it was a very different episode, something unlike we've never done before, which
2:21.4	was that I went very carefully through every single paper that has come out about 3-I
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Astronomy Cast, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Astronomy Cast and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.