Some comets are so close to the Sun they're almost impossible to see. But astronomers saw this one as it started to break up.
Using ground-based and space-based observations, a team of researchers has been monitoring a difficult-to-see comet carefully. It’s called Comet 323P/SOHO, and it was discovered over 20 years ago in 1999. But it’s difficult to observe due to its proximity to the Sun.Comets with the SOHO designation were discovered with the SOHO spacecraft. The is a joint ESA/NASA mission launched in 1995.
“However, in our post-perihelion observations, it developed a long, narrow tail mimicking a disintegrating cometary debris cloud,” the authors write in their paper. According to the new paper, 323P/SOHO is flirting with destruction. The researchers identified two 20 meter diameter fragments coming from the comet shortly in March 2021. They also found that the comet lost between 0.1-10% of the mass of its nucleus. It looks like its end is near.
If it seems strange that the researchers only observed the comet’s debris tail after it left perihelion, that’s because of how difficult near-Sun comets are to watch. At perihelion, the Sun’s brightness renders the comets nearly unobservable. They’re observable in any detail outside of perihelion.
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