Thecomet lovejoy, discovered on December 2, is heading towards the Sun and is expected to meet its destination onDecember 15. Its orbit will bring it closer to only 140,000 kilometers above the solar surface. At that distance,the icy comet won’t survive the star’s heat. What’s more, comets are such loosely cohesive masses of ice and rock that Lovejoy could disintegrate at any moment.
In these moments he has entered for the first timein the field of view of the SOHO solar space observatory, which indicates that this icy object is in the last stage of its destructive journey towards the Sun. The SOHO satellite, of ESA and NASA, is an exceptional discoverer of comets: it has already hunted 2,110 since its launch in 1995.
The cometC/2011 W3It was discovered from the ground by Australian astronomer Terry Lovejoy, hence its name. Terry is a pioneer in discovering comets using SOHO data available on the Internet; now he has become the first person to discover a comet that gets very close to the sun both from Earth and using data from a space telescope.
Comet Lovejoy belongs to theKreutz group, made up of comets believed to be the fragments of a large comet fractured centuries ago. Some of the brightest comets in history were also part of this group, such as theIkeya-Seki, which in 1965 became visible even during the day.
“SOHO discovers new comets from the Kreutz group every few days, but it is much rarer for them to be seen or discovered from the mainland,” says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Laboratory, who is responsible for the web page on comets approaching the Sun. ” This is the first find of a Kreutz group comet in the last 40 years, so we don’t really know how bright it will get. But I think it will be the brightest Kreutz group comet ever seen by SOHO, “he added.
