A telescope hunting dark matter just found a comet hiding in its pictures

The European Space Agency's Euclid telescope was launched to study dark matter and dark energy — the biggest picture there is. But in its images, astronomer Mikko Pöntinen of the University of Helsinki spotted a small, fast streak: a never-before-seen comet, more than 807 million miles from Earth, shedding dust and gas. His moving-object detection software flagged the interloper across several images, and on October 8 the Minor Planet Center confirmed it as comet C/2026 S1 (Euclid). 'I was excited to see my software flag a streak smeared across several images,' Pöntinen says.