NASA has captured the moment the ‘Great Halloween Comet’ was swallowed by the sun.
The agency’s probe witnessed the comet soar directly into the sun’s fiery orbit and disintegrated without a trace Monday.
Astronomers discovered C/2024 S1 ATLAS in September, giving it the nickname due to it making a close approach days before Halloween.
Models predicted that the comet would glow brighter than Venus by the holiday, but on October 24, ATLAS flew past Earth and swung around the sun.
NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was the last to see the comet as it soared within 750,000 miles of the sun and disappeared.
Karl Battams, lead for NASA’s Sungrazer Project, said: ‘This comet was likely already a rubble pile by the time it entered SOHO’s field of view.
‘Unlike comet C/2023 A3, which never passed closer than about a third of Earth’s distance to the sun, C/2024 S1 is a true sungrazer: It passed within 1one percent of Earth’s distance to the sun, and has been completely vaporized as a result.’
Both comments are known as ‘sungrazers’ due to traveling 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 soared closer to the sun
The Halloween Comet had shown signs of instability when telescopes in Hawaii identified it on September 27, including a sudden release of dust and cause.
While not unusual behavior for a comet, it was a sign of nucleus fragmentation that means the ball of ice is starting to break apart.
And the farther out in space an objects forms, the faster it is likely to happen.
Astronomer Heinrich Kreutz was the first to name the comets in the late 1880s, studying as they grazed close to the sun.
And many even followed the same orbit.
‘That is, they were all fragments of a single comet which had broken up,’ the European Space Agency, which partners with NASA to operate SOHO, said.
It is probable that the original comet, and its fragments, had broken up repeatedly as they orbited the Sun with a period of about 800 years.
‘In honor of his work, this group of comets was named the Kreutz sungrazers.’
Sungrazing comets have been observed possibly as far back as the year 371 BC.
A comet seen by Aristotle and Ephorus may have been a Kreutz sungrazer.
C/2023 A3 – also known as Tsuchinshan-Atlas – also made a close pass at Earth this month.
The comet, known as a sungrazer, took a straight path Earth’s star and vaporized in the fiery orbit
Astronomers suggested the comet orbits the sun once every 80,000 years, making its current trip through our solar system the first since humans began to move out of Africa.
A3 was discovered by researchers last year and first observed at China’s Purple Mountain Observatory and an Atlas (Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System) telescope in South Africa.
It is named after both observatories.
It is thought to have originated from the Oort cloud, a giant spherical icy shell that surrounds our solar system and dates back some 4.5 billion years and may measure as much as 25 miles across.
Dr Gregory Brown, senior public astronomy officer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, said: ‘The comet itself comes from an extremely distant part of our solar system, a place called the Oort cloud.
‘It contains lots of bits left over from the formation of the solar system. Every so often, one of those bits will be nudged inwards in towards the solar system, where it could end up in a very, very long orbit.
‘Those 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 to the inner solar system was about 80,000 years ago.’
While comets often appear as a flaming fireball in the sky, Dr Brown said they are sometimes referred to as ‘dirty snowballs’, as they contain a considerable amount of ice.
As they fall in towards the sun they thaw out, and the gas and dust trapped within their ice is released, forming a misty cloud around them and the illusion of a ‘tail’.
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