Telescope image shows remains of comet ATLAS.

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Many skywatchers had high hope that comet ATLAS would light up the light sky this spring, instead, the icy objects crumbled inti pieces.

An astronomer at the University of Maryland, ye Quanzhi, take a look at comet ATLAS on Monday, April 20 using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, he caught a stunning image of its fragment.









Ye hopes those mini-comets will help scientists understand what caused ATLAS to fall apart. in particular, astronomers rely on the distance between fragments to reconstruct events, since that distance increase as more time passes since a specific fracture.

In the Hubble image, ye said he believes two of those fragments have broken down even more, yielding the two pairs of bright spot on the right which represents the four largest fragments at the time.

Also, the two clouds of brightness on the left may represents where older fragments hach broken up into smaller pieces before beginning the observation, which lasted for one of hubble orbits.

Ye had hoped that he would be able to spot more mini comets in those regions, but it appeared those fragments had disintegrated by the time the observation began.

ATLAD hails from the Oort clouds, a distant sphere of icy rubble enveloping the solar system as much as 15 trillion km away from earth, that vast distance make it difficult for astronomers to study Oort clouds directly, but watching ATLAS antics will help scientists to develop new hypothesis what's happening out there.






ATLAS is only the  second bright Oort cloud comet whose fragments hubble has been able to observe in it 30 years of work.













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