NASA has captured the moment the sun swallows the ‘Great Halloween Comet’.
The agency’s probe watched the comet rise directly into the sun’s fiery orbit and disintegrate without a trace on Monday.
Astronomers discovered C/2024 S1 ATLAS in September, giving it the nickname because it approached days before Halloween.
Models predicted the comet would outshine Venus by the holidays, but on October 24, ATLAS passed close to Earth and orbited the sun.
NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was the last to see the comet as it rose 750,000 miles from the sun and disappeared.
Karl Battams, leader of NASA’s Sungrazer Project, said: “This comet was probably already a pile of debris when it entered SOHO’s field of view.
‘Unlike comet C/2023 A3, which never passed less than a third of the distance from Earth to the Sun, C/2024 S1 is a true Sungrazer: it passed less than 1 one percent of the distance from Earth to the Sun. the Earth to the Sun and has been completely vaporized as a result.’
Both commentaries are known as ‘sun-grazers’ because they travel close to our planet’s star, where they light up 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 approached the sun.
Comet Halloween had shown signs of instability when telescopes in Hawaii identified it on September 27, including a sudden release of dust and its cause.
While not unusual behavior for a comet, it was a sign of core fragmentation, meaning the ice ball is starting to break up.
And the further out in space an object forms, the faster it is likely to happen.
Astronomer Heinrich Kreutz was the first to name comets in the late 1880s, studying them as they passed close to the sun.
And many even followed the same orbit.
“That is, they were all fragments of a single comet that had disintegrated,” said the European Space Agency, which collaborates with NASA to operate SOHO.
The original comet and its fragments likely had broken up repeatedly while orbiting the Sun over a period of about 800 years.
“In honor of their work, this group of kites was named Kreutz Sunrazers.”
Comets grazing the Sun have possibly 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 by Earth this month.
The comet, known as a sungrazer, followed a straight path toward Earth’s star and vaporized 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 at an Atlas (Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Warning System) telescope in South Africa.
It is named after both observatories.
It is believed to have originated in the Oort cloud, a gigantic spherical shell of ice that surrounds our solar system and dates back about 4.5 billion years and can measure up to 40 kilometers in diameter.
Dr Gregory Brown, senior public astronomy officer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, said: “The comet itself comes from an extremely distant part of our solar system, a place called the Oort cloud.
«It contains many remains from the formation of the solar system. Every once in a while, one of those bits will be pushed into the solar system, where it could end up in a very, very long orbit.
“These orbits can take extraordinarily long periods of time: thousands of years. The estimate on this particular comet is that if it is in a stable orbit, its last path into the interior of the solar system was about 80,000 years ago.’
Although comets usually appear as flaming fireballs in the sky, Dr. Brown said they are sometimes called “dirty snowballs” as they contain a considerable amount of ice.
As they fall toward the sun, they thaw and the gas and dust trapped within their ice are released, forming a hazy cloud around them and the illusion of a “tail.”
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