Two Comets-Lower Left of Sun

Space Weather News for March 12, 2010
http://spaceweather.com

Today, a newly discovered comet is plunging toward the sun for a close encounter it probably will not survive. The comet is rapidly vaporizing and appears very bright in coronagraph images from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Visit http://spaceweather.com for movies of the ongoing encounter and more information about the comet.

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Comet's dramatic death dive into the sun
March 13, 2010

A space telescope has caught a giant comet's extraordinary final hours as it made a dive of death into the sun.

The cosmic missile, with a head the size of the Isle of Wight and a tail many millions of miles long, appeared in pictures being taken by a NASA satellite on Friday (12th).

The orbiting SoHo observatory, which continually monitors the sun, recorded the rare and previously unspotted brilliant comet swooping in from the lower left of its pictures.

It grew ever brighter as it aimed directly at our home star, shown as a white ring in the images. It was immediately vaporised by the sun's powerful nuclear furnace.

Experts believe the huge comet was just a fragment of a vast supercomet that broke up at least 2,000 years ago. The resulting debris, now orbiting in the solar system as smaller comets, is called the Kreutz family after a 19th century German astronomer who studied them.

Astronomers say that many much smaller Kreutz fragments, too small to be seen, graze past the sun every day and disintegrate.

This week NASA revealed that their new Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer space telescope - WISE - could detect a dim brown dwarf companion star to the sun that may be sending comets towards us from a vast reservoir of the icy objects called the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system.

Robin Scagell, vice-president of the Society for Popular Astronomy, said today: "A comet like this will be like no more than an annoying fleabite for the sun. But if it something of a similar size hit the Earth it could blast a crater the size of a city and cause country-wide devastation. So it is rather alarming that they just arrive out of nowhere and are so unpredictable!"

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Dirk Peeters

Image taken:
Mar. 13, 2010

Location:
SOHO LASCO C3

Details:
One less comet ? Make that four ! Looking at the latest lasco c3 movie, i noticed a small comet 1 day before the bright comet and another one 1 day after the 'big one'. Studying the images i saw to my surprise that the latest comet was actually a double one. So that makes four !

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On March 12th, 2010 SpaceWeather.com reported that the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) watched as a comet plunged into the sun and disappeared. Upon closer inspection of the SOHO images I found that it was part of a series of at least four comet fragments following the same trajectory. The highlights in this video are my own addition to make the comets more visible.

In the first view from the SOHO Lasco C3 camera (wider angle) a much smaller, previously unseen comet precedes the brighter comet. Then, as reported, the bright main comet is seen plunging towards the sun. Shortly following it is a faint pair of comets headed on the same path, which, at the time of publishing this video, have yet to reach the sun.

In the second view from the SOHO Lasco C2 camera (close-up angle) the first faint comet is briefly seen before being disintegrated by the sun's gravity, followed shortly by the much brighter second comet. The third and fourth pair of comets have yet to enter the field of view of the Lasco C2 camera.

(snip)

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