For the first time,a comet has been captured at the precise moment in which it disintegrated when entering the solar atmosphere. Is aboutC / 2011 N3, one of the comets, members of the Kreutz family, known to get dangerously close to the Sun. In the last 15 years, scientists had detected around 2,000 of these celestial bodies, but until now they had not been able to see one disintegrate upon reaching the star.
To achieve this this time, Professor Carolus Schrijver of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California and his team have combined observations from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), the Solar Heliospheric Observatory ( SOHO), and the Solar-Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) to follow the comet’s path. In an article published in the magazineScience, the researchers detail how the comet entered the Sun’s low corona and disintegrated on July 6, 2011. The data from the three instruments allowed them to calculate thatComet C / 2011 N3 reached about 100,000 kilometers from the solar surface, penetrated the atmosphere and first became tiny pieces before evaporatingcompletely.
Carey Lisse, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, who publishes in the same issue ofScience A comment on Schrijver’s work, highlighted that the results of this observation, the first of its kind, lay the foundation for future measurements of the decay of these comets.
The Kreutz family of comets is believed to originate fromfragments of a large comet 20 to 100 kilometers in diameter, Halley type, which broke 2,500 years ago. That is why they hope that, in addition, their study will help to understand the origins of the solar system.
