From 7 till 13 October 2024, ESA/NASA’s SOHO spacecraft recorded Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS), the second brightest comet it has ever seen. In the meantime, giant quantities of fabric had been being spewed out by the Solar (coated within the centre), and planet Mercury is seen to the left.
The comet’s nucleus is clearly seen, surrounded by a dusty coma and trailing an impressively lengthy tail. SOHO sees the big mud tail edge-on, curving in on itself as it’s pushed outward by photo voltaic wind.
On the finish of the video you may also see a uncommon phenomenon referred to as an ‘anti-tail’: an extended, skinny line that factors in the direction of the Solar. This tail is an optical phantasm coming from SOHO getting an edge-on view of the bigger cometary mud particles that accumulate within the comet’s orbital airplane.
Comet C/2023 A3 was seen for the primary time early final 12 months. It almost certainly got here from the distant Oort cloud, and the final time this comet flew by means of the internal Photo voltaic System (if ever) was a minimum of 80 000 years in the past.
The comet reached an estimated peak brightness simply past –4 magnitude. (The extra unfavourable the visible magnitude worth, the brighter the item.) Of the greater than 5000 comets SOHO has seen flying previous the Solar, solely Comet C/2006 P1 (McNaught) was brighter, with a visible magnitude of –5.5.
SOHO’s location between the Solar and Earth gave it a front-row seat, however the identical comet has been seen from Earth each night since 12 October 2024. All through October, because the comet strikes farther away from the Solar, it is going to steadily develop fainter and rise larger up within the western sky.
The week that SOHO watched Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS was additionally a wild one by way of area climate. The Solar unleashed at least 4 X-class flares (the very best depth sort of flare), 28 medium-intensity M-class flares, and 31 coronal mass ejections – the latter being seen as white clouds of fabric within the video. All this exercise led to 2 geomagnetic storms on Earth, leading to lovely auroras lighting up the evening sky.
SOHO, brief for Photo voltaic and Heliospheric Observatory, is a joint ESA-NASA mission to review the Solar. For nearly 29 years now, it has been watching the Solar itself in addition to the a lot fainter mild coming from the Solar’s outer environment, known as the photo voltaic corona. The info proven on this video had been taken by the LASCO C3 coronagraph instrument.
Particular because of Simeon Schmauß, who processed the uncooked knowledge to create this spectacular video. For comparability, here’s a video of the comet with extra commonplace knowledge processing – the comet is so vibrant that it partially saturated SOHO’s sensor.
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