Space and astronomy news
The 5,000th comet discovered with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft is noted by a small white box in the upper left portion of this image. A zoomed-in inset shows the comet as a faint dot between the white vertical lines. The image was taken on March 25, 2024, by SOHO’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph , which uses a disk to block the bright Sun and reveal faint features around it.
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory was designed to examine the Sun, but as a side benefit, it has been the most successful comet hunter ever built. Since early in the mission, citizen scientists have been scanning through the telescope’s data, searching for icy objects passing close to the Sun. An astronomy student in Czechia has identified 200 comets in SOHO data since he started in 2009 at the age of 13. He recently spotted the observatory’s 5,000th comet.
“Prior to the launch of the SOHO mission and the Sungrazer Project, there were only a couple dozen sungrazing comets on record – that’s all we knew existed,” said Karl Battams, who is the principal investigator for the Sungrazer Project, the citizen science project that was launched after so many comets started showing up in the data. “The fact that we’ve finally reached this milestone – 5000 comets – is just unbelievable to me.
SOHO moves around the Sun on the sunward side of Earth, where it enjoys a clear, uninterrupted view of the Sun, by slowly orbiting around Lagrange point L1. That means it has been observing the Sun 24 hours a day, 365 days a year without interruptions since shortly after it launched in 1995. With this view, SOHO can easily spot the kind of comet that’s known as a sungrazer – so named because of their close approach to the Sun. Many of these comets don’t survive their close pass to the Sun.
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