New Delhi:
European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has been able to capture a comet torn when it was closely trying to wipe around the sun. The image speaks about every moment of destruction, where the sun's disk that is the white ring can be seen.
NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft was launched in the year 1995,that was constantly looking at the sun and its surrounding enviroment that has turned into an ace comet hunter. About 80 per cent of comets was captured by Soho travel along the Kreutz path, which is said to be the single orbit which took 800 years to complete. This sungrazer belong to Kreutz family and is one of the brightest examples that was spotted by SOHO.
Sun grazers are results of those fragments of a massive comet that broke apart hundreds of years ago. These objects regularly streakin front of SOHO’s field of view. Scientists are interested in Sungrazers because these particle's can help them learn more about the sun. Their unreviled tails of ionized gas illuminate magnetic fields around the sun, so they can act as a tracer that helps scientists observe these invisible fields.
On August 3-4,2016 the comet was approaching the sun at the speed of 1.3 million miles per hour approximately. SOHO observed it first on August 1. When it approched to our closest star, the comet was torn apart and the icy chunk of dust completely vaporized by the intense forces near the sun.
Joe Gurman, mission scientist for Soho at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland said “Soho has a view of about 12-and-a-half million miles beyond the sun. So we expected it might from time to time see a bright comet near the sun. But nobody dreamed we’d approach 200 a year.”
