Solar physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, have captured for the first time the collision of a comet with the sun.
Using instruments aboard NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft, four post-doctoral fellows at UC Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory were able to track the comet as it approached the sun and estimate an approximate time and place of impact. STEREO (Solar TErrestrial RElations Observatory), launched in 2006, consists of identical spacecraft orbiting the sun, one ahead of Earth and one behind Earth, providing a stereo view of the sun.
The researchers then looked at data from the ground-based Mauna Loa Solar Observatory in Hawaii, and found images in the predicted spot of what appears to be a comet approaching the edge of the sun from behind the solar disk.
Click to play embedded YouTube video.
This is the comet and its tail as observed by NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft between March 12 and 14, 2010. The left
side is STEREO B (orbiting behind the Earth) and the right is STEREO A (ahead). The outer images are from Cor2, the
middle ones are from Cor1 and the inner ones of the solar disk are from the EUVI instruments onboard STEREO. (NASA. UC Berkeley)
Hydrogen-alpha observations of the sun's edge from the Coronado instrument of the Mauna Loa
Solar Observatory showing what the authors believe to be the comet approaching the solar limb. (Claire Raftery, Juan Carlos Martinez-Oliveros, Samuel Krucker/UC Berkeley)
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 perhaps a few miles across and a tail many millions of miles long appeared in pictures being taken by a satellite yesterday.
The European Space Agency's orbiting SoHo observatory, launched and operated by NASA, continually monitors the Sun.It recorded the rare brilliant comet swooping in from the lower left of its pictures.
Click on this link at SpaceWeather.com to see an animation of the comet's journey into the Sun, which is masked in the pictures to protect the camera's detectors from being fried.
