28 March 2024 - Mission Day: 10345 - DOY: 088
Pick of The Week
 
 

A Comet's End (March 4, 2004)


Hi-res TIF image (2.2M)

Movies:
MPEG: Large (1.3M), Small (179K)
Quicktime: Large (1.6M), Small (262K)

This rather small comet headed right into the Sun on 28 February 2004. The intensely bright light from our star makes it impossible to view this event from Earth, but SOHO is able to block the Sun's glare using its onboard C3 coronagraph. In just over a day, this comet made the trip from the instrument's field of view (more than 30 solar radii) to the Sun itself. Over its sun-study career, SOHO has discovered over 740 comets, more than anyone or anything else ever has.

Many comets carve such highly elliptical paths on orbits that can take anywhere from a few years to a few hundred years to complete. But if they veer too close to the Sun, as this one and numerous others have done, they will not survive the trip. Comets are frozen balls of ice and dust that are believed to have been created when the universe was very young. Nearly all of the sungrazers observed by SOHO are members of the same group (the Kreutz group), the remains of a single, parent comet that broke up some centuries ago.

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