Something 3x Wider Than Jupiter Appeared Just Past Mars

In August 2026, something more than three times the diameter of Jupiter appeared just beyond the orbit of Mars.

It wasn’t a planet. It wasn’t a spacecraft. And it wasn’t even a new discovery.

It was 220P/McNaught — a faint Jupiter-family comet discovered in 2004 that had spent more than two decades attracting almost no attention.

Then it exploded.

In June, the comet brightened by thousands of times. It faded again — and just ten weeks later, it erupted a second time.

For a few days in early August, the expanding cloud of gas and dust around the tiny nucleus stretched roughly 470,000 kilometers across, large enough to span more than three Jupiters.

But the strangest part came when astronomers analyzed what the two eruptions had released.

They were chemically different.

In this video, we look at the extraordinary double outburst of Comet 220P/McNaught, the expanding shells photographed from Earth, what may cause a comet to suddenly erupt, and why two different explosions may have briefly exposed two different layers of material preserved inside the comet since the early Solar System.

The enormous coma has already faded. The mystery of why this comet suddenly erupted twice has not.
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