NASA has captured the moment the ‘Great Halloween Comet’ was swallowed by the sun.
The agency’s probe watched the comet drift directly into the sun’s fiery orbit and disintegrate without a trace on Monday.
Astronomers discovered C/2024 S1 ATLAS in September and nicknamed it because it passed close by just before Halloween.
Models predicted the comet would glow brighter than Venus during the holiday, but on October 24, ATLAS flew past Earth and orbited the sun.
NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was the last to see the comet as it hovered within 750,000 miles of the sun and disappeared.
Karl Battams, head of NASA’s Sungrazer Project, said: ‘This comet was probably already a mess by the time it entered SOHO’s field of view.
‘Unlike comet C/2023 A3, which never came closer than about a third of the distance from Earth to the Sun, C/2024 S1 is a true sun grazer: it passed within 1 percent of the distance from Earth to the Sun. sun and completely evaporated when a result.’
Both commentaries are known as ‘sungrazers’ because they travel close to our planet’s star, where they glow brightly and often break into smaller pieces.
NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) witnessed the final moments of the ‘Great Halloween Comet’ as it drifted closer to the sun
The Halloween Comet showed signs of instability when telescopes in Hawaii identified it on September 27, including a sudden release of dust and what caused it.
While this is not unusual behavior for a comet, it was a sign of nuclear fragmentation, meaning the ice ball is starting to break apart.
And the further out in space an object forms, the faster this is likely to happen.
Astronomer Heinrich Kreutz was the first to name the comets in the late 1880s, studying them as they grazed close to the Sun.
And many even followed the same job.
“That is, they were all fragments of a single comet that had broken up,” said the European Space Agency, which partners with NASA to exploit SOHO.
It is likely that the original comet and its fragments broke apart repeatedly while orbiting the Sun, with a period of about 800 years.
“In honor of his work, this group of comets was named the Kreutz sungrazers.”
Sun-grazing comets may have been observed as early as 371 BC.
A comet seen by Aristotle and Ephorus may have been a Kreutz sungrazer.
C/2023 A3 – also known as Tsuchinshan-Atlas – also passed close to Earth this month.
The comet, known as sungrazer, followed a straight path past Earth’s star and evaporated in the fiery orbit
Astronomers suggested that the comet orbits the sun once every 80,000 years, making its current journey through our solar system the first since humans began leaving Africa.
A3 was discovered by researchers last year and first observed at China’s Purple Mountain Observatory and an Atlas (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope in South Africa.
It is named after both observatories.
It is believed to originate from the Oort Cloud, a giant spherical ice shell that surrounds our solar system, is about 4.5 billion years old and could be as much as 40 kilometers in diameter.
Dr. Gregory Brown, senior astronomy officer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, said: ‘The comet itself comes from an extremely distant part of our solar system, a place called the Oort Cloud.
‘It contains many pieces left over from the formation of the solar system. Every now and then one of those pieces gets pushed inward toward the solar system, where it could end up in a very, very long orbit.
‘These orbits can last extremely long: thousands of years. The estimate for this particular comet is that if it is in a stable orbit, its last path to the inner solar system was about 80,000 years ago.”
Although comets often appear as flaming fireballs in the sky, Dr. Brown says they are sometimes called “dirty snowballs” because they contain a significant amount of ice.
As they fall towards the sun, they thaw, and the gas and dust trapped in their ice is released, creating a misty cloud around them and the illusion of a ‘tail’.
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