Solar Orbiter caught an incredible view of a comet!
Newly processed data from the ESA - European Space Agency / NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration from this January shows comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) in full glory as it flew by the Sun.
The Solar Orbiter Heliospheric Imager (SoloHI) instrument from U.S. Naval Research Laboratory - NRL caught this view in two of its four “tiles,” or viewports.
The encounter happened Jan. 14-25, while Solar Orbiter was heading toward Venus and comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) coincidentally swung by the Sun. Other Sun-watching spacecraft saw the comet too (go.nasa.gov/3QM9C15), but SoloHI’s high-res view makes the stripes, or striations, in the comet’s tail stand out even more, which have caught scientists’ attention.
Comets have two tails: a dust tail, formed as ice and dust vaporize away, and an ion tail, a stream of electrically charged gases. Sometimes it’s easy to make out a comet’s two tails. Sometimes, like with C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)’s heavily striated tail, it’s not.
Studying Comet McNaught from 2007, scientists found that striations may be a strange combination of the two tails: bits of dust that behave as if they were electrically charged, aligning themselves with the Sun’s magnetic fields. go.nasa.gov/3Yno8RI
The heavily striated tail of C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) may give us more clues on the matter. In any case, what we stand to learn goes beyond comets. These dusty snowballs formed with our solar system, so a look at them is like a peek some 4.6 billion years into the past!