NASA’s STEREO spacecraft discovered that a powerful eruption from the sun ripped apart the tail of Comet Ponsbrooks, although it quickly grew back. This isn’t the first time STEREO A has spotted the sun playing with such a dirty snowball, but these images are particularly striking.
A comet’s tail is a slender object formed when the solar wind pushes gas and dust released by sublimating ice away from the comet’s head. It doesn’t take much to disturb them; sometimes you’ll see comets with two tails, one gas and one dust, pointing in different directions, with the gas tail being particularly sensitive to conditions.
When solar flares lift coronal mass ejections (CMEs) to the sun’s surface, the ejected particles can impact comet tails, something the STEREO spacecraft tracking solar storms often detects. Take, for example, this case from 2013, when two comets were visible in the same field of view, one of which was wagging its tail like a tadpole or a frozen but particularly determined sperm.
As seen with STEREO, the 2013 CME managed to impact two comets simultaneously.
Image credit: Karl Battams/NASA/STEREO/CIOC
The STEREO spacecraft doesn’t just watch comet tails for fun. As their website points out, using comet tails as tracers can provide valuable data on solar wind conditions near the Sun.
As its name suggests, the STEREO spacecraft is designed to provide dual views of solar activity, with one orbiting a few weeks shorter than Earth’s and the other slightly longer. Their often long baselines between them gave NASA an unprecedented view of solar activity over the decade, but STEREO B lost contact in 2016, and even a brief attempt to restore contact failed.
STEREO A has continued to evolve, although the abbreviation is no longer accurate. Its full name is Solar-Terrestrial Observatory A, and it continues to help astronomers understand how changes in the sun affect the Earth. As these images show, it does the same for other components of the solar system.
On April 12, STEREO A detected a large coronal mass ejection rising from the Sun. This event was almost directly opposite Earth and therefore did not trigger any auroras here, although another aurora illuminated the skies over Tasmania around the same time. A week later, however, Spaceweather.com noted the impact of this incident on Comet Pons-Brooks. In astronomical terms, this is a disconnection event, where the extra force of the solar wind causes the comet’s tail to break away from the comet’s nucleus and sail away like an Arhat flag. two towers.
The effect is so strong partly because coronal mass ejections are so powerful, but also because Pons-Brooks is 120 million kilometers (75 million miles) from the sun, 80 percent of the distance from Earth. Although the comet appears to be almost touching Jupiter from STEREO’s perspective, the giant planet is almost 1 billion kilometers (620 million miles) away and would hardly be affected.
Pons-Brooks hasn’t really lived up to his reputation lately. It was labeled a Devil’s Comet because it exploded several times along the way (as it had done on previous visits), some of which produced what looked like devil’s horns. Sadly, just when they were trying their best to let more people see the comet, the explosion stopped. It’s particularly unfortunate that the imagined volcanic eruption of this coronal mass ejection didn’t sweep up something so bright and complex.
The good news is that while comets are often compared to cats, they’re more like skinks when it comes to their tails, which can lose their appendages and regrow them.
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Image Source : www.iflscience.com