Chuck Bednar for redOrbit.com – @BednarChuck
An unusual comet was spotted by the NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) as it travelled near the sun late last week, and unlike most other comets that make such a voyage, this one actually lived to tell the tale.
According to the US space agency, these types of comets are known as sungrazers and typically evaporate in the intense sunlight. However, this recently spotted comet made it to within 2.2 million miles of the sun and was actually able to survive the journey intact.
[STORY: Sungrazing comet: wrong place, wrong time]
That’s not the only thing about the comet that caught NASA’s attention, though. Not only was it a sungrazer, it is what is known as a non-group comet, meaning that it does not belong to any known family of comets. The majority of comets observed by SOHO are members of the Kreutz family, all of which had separated from the same giant comet centuries ago.
Comet me bro!
“There’s a half-decent chance that ground observers might be able to detect it in the coming weeks,” explained Karl Battams, a solar scientist at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, DC. “But it’s also possible that events during its trip around, the sun will cause it to die fairly fast.”
Since it first launched in 1995, SOHO has discovered 2,875 comets, making it the pre-eminent comet-locating spacecraft of all time, according to NASA. However, it observed only a handful of non-group comets (such as this new one) each year, the agency added.
The Sungrazer Project explains that these types of comets have been observed for hundreds of years, dating back at least to the late 1880’s. There is no formal definition of what a sungrazing comet is, and to date no comet has ever been seen hitting the photosphere (or solar surface). The closest sungrazers typically come pass within 50,000 kilometers of the sun.
[STORY: Speed of sun shockingly slower than believed]
“A popular misconception is that sungrazing comets cause solar flares and CMEs (coronal mass ejections),” the project website said. “While it is true that we have observed bright comets approach the Sun immediately before CME’s/flares, there is absolutely no connection between the two events. The sungrazer comets… are completely insignificant in size compared the Sun.”
While there has been speculation that sungrazers were observed by Aristotle and Ephorus during ancient times, there had only been nine confirmed sightings until 1979, and all of them had come from the ground. Then, in 1979, the first space-based observatories designed to look at the solar atmosphere (coronagraphs) began to detect them, starting with the P78-1 satellite.
P78-1’s SOLWIND instrument on the P78-1 satellite discovered 6 sungrazers between 1979 and 1984, and the CP coronagraph on the Solar Maximum Mission (SMM) found an additional 10 of them between 1987 and 1989. SMM is also noteworthy because, in 1984, it became the first satellite ever retrieved and repaired by a NASA space shuttle crew, the Sungrazer Project noted.
“SOHO is the most successful comet discoverer in history, having found well over two thousand comets since the satellite launched in 1995,” the website added. “What’s even more impressive is that the majority of these comets have been found by amateur astronomers and enthusiasts from all over the world, scouring the images for a likely comet candidate from the comfort of their own home.”
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