A comet heading toward the sun early Sunday was captured and imaged by NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
“This dying comet was almost certainly a ‘Kreutz sungrazer’, part of a giant comet that broke apart centuries ago,” astronomer Tony Phillips wrote for Spaceweather.com. “It orbits Earth, and every day at least one of them gets very close and shatters. Most of them less than a few meters in diameter are too small to be seen, but sometimes a large piece, like today’s, stands out.”
The video, seen in the tweet below, consists of a series of images taken from SOHO. In the lower right part of the dial, it is possible to see the small comet, which cannot withstand the intense gravity of our star. Moving on to Sunday, it appears to have disappeared in the solar disk blocked by SOHO’s coronagraph, which was used to prevent damage to the device.
THE COMET DID NOT SURVIVE: As with most sun-diving comets, this one did not come out the other side of the Sun after its nearest approach to the Sun (perihelion). 🙁 pic.twitter.com/ok5fHbfdDv
— Keith Strong (@drkstrong) August 7, 2022
Since it did not reappear on the other side of the sun, we can assume that this object was completely destroyed by the intense heat.
Also, this moving image provides an interesting snapshot of just how turbulent the Sun is currently as it approaches a peak in sunspot activity sometime between now and 2025. A prominent coronal mass ejection can be seen exploding on the other side of the Sun as the comet is rapidly heading towards extinction.
Most comets are thought to originate from the outer edges of our solar system in a cold, dark region known as the Oort cloud. Many have very long orbits that allow them to pass through the inner solar system and bring them closer to us only once every few decades, once a century or longer.
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