Related topics: sun

Near-sun comet roasted to death

Astronomers using a fleet of world leading telescopes on the ground and in space have captured images of a periodic rocky near-sun comet breaking apart. This is the first time such a comet has been caught in the act of disintegrating ...

4,000th comet discovered by solar observatory

On June 15, 2020, a citizen scientist spotted a never-before-seen comet in data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO—the 4,000th comet discovery in the spacecraft's 25-year history.

Image: SOHO's equinox sun

Last Wednesday, all locations on our planet enjoyed roughly the same number of hours of day and night. This event, called an equinox, takes place twice a year – around 20 March and then again around 23 September.

Image: 22 years of SOHO

The activity cycle of the sun – where the number of sunspots increase and decrease – has been monitored regularly for around 250 years, but the use of space-based telescopes has given us a whole new perspective of our ...

Image: ESA, NASA's SOHO sees bright sungrazer comet

ESA and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, saw a bright comet plunge toward the sun on Aug. 3-4, 2016, at nearly 1.3 million miles per hour. Comets are chunks of ice and dust that orbit the sun, usually ...

Image: Artificial eclipse

The sun experiences both calm and tempestuous periods of activity. At its most active, our star can fling out multiple bursts of particles in a single day in events known as coronal mass ejections, or CMEs. Particles within ...

Spacecraft discovers thousands of doomed comets

For an astronomer, discovering a comet can be the highlight of a lifetime. Great comets carry the names of their discoverers into history. Comet Halley, Comet Lovejoy, Comet Hale-Bopp are just a few examples….

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