Jun-ichi Watanabe

October 6, 2021, 8:30 PM Hawaii time. The StarCam camera on the dome of the Subaru Telescope gazes impassively at the sky, streaming the view on YouTube. Four and a half hours earlier, somewhere far away, Earth passed through an invisible trail — the dust tail of comet 15P/Finlay. Models predicted a peak, but would anyone see these 'shooting stars'?

Beyond Neptune, in the icy belt, astronomers watched as object (612533) 2002 XV93 momentarily occulted a distant star. Using метод прохождений (when a planet dims the star's light for a second, like a fly in front of a lamp), Уильям Боруки and Дэвид Шарбонно determined: the light not only dimmed but also shifted…