NASA solar spacecraft captures comet Atlas streaking past the sun

The fascinating space snowball comet atlas (C / 2019 Y4) has astronomers with one Tons of great photo ops in the six months since their first discovery. The cosmic wanderer is in an extensive death dive towards the sun and, heated by our home star, is slowly break apart. But it’s still alive! And the latest images from a NASA spacecraft show the comet’s journey past the sun in exquisite details.

On Wednesday, Karl Battams, astrophysicist at the Naval Research Laboratory, released a great short video of Atlas on his way through the solar system. Battams lead them Sungrazer projectwho uses images from solar telescopes that are maintained by NASA and the European Space Agency to search for moving objects around our star.

Battam’s processed animation uses a series of images from NASA’s Stereo-A spacecraft, a space-based observatory that examines the May 30 sun. Against the background of stars, Atlas moves through the image on his journey through the solar system.

The end result is breathtaking, but Battams’ pictures are “not inherently pretty” according to Battams.

“The raw data always contain various instrumental and astronomical effects that need to be removed to better improve the functions we are interested in,” he says. In this case, Battams averaged the background to face the comet

However, Atlas is not the only interesting phenomenon that occurs in animation. As the footage is captured by Stereo-A’s heliospheric imagers, which can capture the solar wind, ghostly streaks of star outflows are visible.

Another bonus? The planet Mercury, which sneaks out of sight in the course of the animation from the upper left quadrant. As Battams states in his tweet, Mercury has “a tail”, a trace of gas caused by the solar winds that sweep across the planet. Mercury recently reached perihelion – the point in orbit closest to the sun – when it was about 29 million miles from the star.

Atlas’ next approach to the sun was scheduled for May 31. Battams noted in a subsequent tweet that he hopes to update the animation with more data in the coming days. Some astronomers have suggested Atlas could even dissolve into “a mist of dust and gas”. at the next approach.

The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, launched in February to study the sun, went through the comet’s ionic tail between May 31st and June 1st and is expected to go through its dust tail on June 6th – giving astronomers the rare opportunity to examine the space rock in more detail.

You can see the full video below: