NASA's Hubble Space Telescope captures image of the farthest active inbound comet

These observations represent the earliest signs of activity ever seen from a comet entering the solar system’s planetary zone for the first time. NASA ’s Hubble Space Telescope has captured the farthest active inbound comet ever seen, at a whopping distance of 1.5 billion miles from the Sun. “K2 is so far from the Sun and so cold, we know for sure that the activity – all the fuzzy stuff making it look like a comet – is not produced, as in other comets, by the evaporation of water ice,” said lead researcher David Jewitt of the University of California, Los Angeles. Based on the Hubble observations of K2’s coma, Jewitt suggests that sunlight is heating frozen volatile gases - such as oxygen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide - that coat the comet’s frigid surface.