Solar Corona, Sungrazing Comets, LASCO
Two "sungrazing" comets are seen heading in tandem towards the Sun's corona. They do not reappear on the other side. The comets follow similar but not identical orbits and enter the tenuous outer atmosphere of the Sun. Shortly after the comets disappeared behind the occulting disks of the coronagraph, a bright helical-shape prominence erupts from the Sun as part of a CME. The planet Mars can be seen in the upper right corner while the bright star Aldebaran can be seen in the lower right part. Comets, composed of ice and dust, characteristically have particles streaming out behind them. Comets can be found zooming around space quite frequently. A sungrazing comet is a comet that passes extremely close to the Sun at perihelion, sometimes within a few thousand kilometres of the Sun's surface. While small sungrazers can be completely evaporated during such a close approach to the Sun, larger sungrazers can survive many perihelion passages. However, the strong evaporation and tidal forces they experience often lead to their fragmentation.
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Photo credit: © Photo Researchers / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
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Keywords: -type, activity, angle, astronomical, astronomy, body, celestial, comet, comets, corona, coronagraph, deep, disc, dwarf, g2v, grazer, grazing, heavenly, image, large, lasco, main, main-sequence, object, occultation, science, sequence, sky, solar, space, spectrometric, star, sun, sun-grazer, sun-grazing, sungrazer, sungrazing, surface, yellow
