European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) captured a comet torn apart when it tried to wipe closely around the sun yesterday. The image shows very moment of destruction, where the white ring is the sun’s disk.
The comet was approaching the sun on August 3-4, 2016 at the speed of 1.3 million miles per hour approximately. It was first observed by SOHO on August 1. When it came very near to our closest star, the comet was torn apart and the icy chunk of dust was completely vaporized by the intense forces near the sun.
Comets are chunks of ice and dust that orbit the sun, usually on highly elliptical orbits that carry them far beyond the orbit of Pluto at their farthest points. This comet, first spotted by SOHO on Aug. 1, is part of the Kreutz family of comets, a group of comets with related orbits that broke off of a huge comet several centuries ago.
This comet didn’t fall into the sun, but rather whipped around it – or at least, it would have if it had survived its journey. Like most sungrazing comets, this comet was torn apart and vaporized by the intense forces near the sun.
Joe Gurman, mission scientist for Soho at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland said “Soho has a view of about 12-and-a-half million miles beyond the sun. So we expected it might from time to time see a bright comet near the sun. But nobody dreamed we’d approach 200 a year.”
The disk of the sun is represented by the white circle in this image.