Surprised Ink!: Comet Lovejoy lives to graze the Sun another day.
Solar Dynamics Observatory Screenshot
The news yesterday, at the mostly-little outlets that perk up for events such as weird solar storms and odd asteroids, and as we tracked in the previous post, was that a sun-grazing comet just discovered was about to meet its just desserts. Surely, doom awaited via Comet Lovejoy’s “kamikaze” zip just above the Sun’s tangible atmosphere, or photosphere. The route took it through the searing corona of glowing, newborn solar wind and just above a throbbing sea of of magnetically-channeled plasma.
Well, the kamikaze flew right through the fry pot of boiling roil and came out the other side. Several orbiting, solar-observing satellites kept their cameras on it. That screenshot there is from one, a video on YouTube. Hurrah for escapist science and this small news diversions from the Euro crisis, the dull and half-hearted celebration of the end of the American war in Iraq, and the death of Christopher Hitchins and his distinctive voice in journalism.
Stories:
- Discovery News – Ian O’Neill: Lovejoy Lives! Comet Survives Hellish Encounter With Sun ; This has another, eye-popping mage (actually just the opposite – you gotta squint to see the plucky little thing as it exits the scene) from the SDO satellite, the flaring sun glowing ominously in a baleful, yellow rendition of ultraviolet emissions.
- Daily Mail – Ted Thornhill: Comet survives hellish journey through the Sun – where it’s a toasty 1.1millionC ; More pics from the image-crazed art editors at the Mail.
- Space.com – Mike Wall: Comet survives fiery plunge through sun, NASA says ;
This is so far. Perhaps a few more will pop up. (Use suggest stories function, always easily found on tracker homepage, to tip us off to good ones – mediocre and dreadful ones welcome too.)
UPDATES:
- AP – Seth Borenstein: Take that Icarus: Comet shows you can get really close to sun and survive, amazing astronomers; Where we learn that Comet Lovejoy found neither love nor joy. It lost 90 percent of itself. The tail, its gases ionized presumably and vulnerable to electromagnetic forces, got raked off and stuck in the corona.
- Charlie Petit
