本帖最后由 gohomeman1 于 2009-3-22 16:42 编辑
掠日彗星
2009 March 22
Sungrazer
Credit: LASCO,SOHO Consortium,NRL,ESA,NASA
Explanation: The Sun destroyed this comet. Arcing toward a fiery fate, this Sungrazer cometwas recorded by the SOHO spacecraft's Large Angle Spectrometric COronagraph(LASCO) on 1996 Dec. 23.LASCO uses an occulting disk, partially visible at the lower right,to block out the otherwise overwhelmingsolar disk allowing it toimage the inner 5 million miles of the relatively faintcorona.The comet is seen as itscoma enters the bright equatorialsolar wind region(oriented vertically). Spots and blemishes on the imageare background stars and camera streaks caused by charged particles.Positioned in space tocontinuously observe the Sun, SOHO has now been use to discover over 1,500 comets, including numerous sungrazers.Based on their orbits, they arebelieved to belong to a family of comets created by successivebreak ups from a single large parent cometwhich passed very near the sun in the twelfth century.The Great Comet of 1965, Ikeya-Seki, was also a member of the Sungrazer family, coming within about 650,000 kilometers of the Sun's surface.Passing so close to the Sun, Sungrazers are subjected to destructive tidal forces along with intense solar heat.This comet, known as SOHO 6, did not survive. |