Astronomers took another look at a massive comet grazing on the sun, now near our star, revealing a trail of dust behind and in front of the comet. The 3.7-mile-wide (6-kilometer) comet known as 96P Machholz has long been an object of fascination for astronomers, especially since a 2008 chemical analysis revealed that it has an unusual composition for such a short-period, low element. has been. comets, like carbon.

This is in addition to the unusual dust and ice remnants that comets produce as they pass the Sun and their materials are heated from solid to gas, in addition to suspicions that 96P Machholz has a prominent debris tail.

Astronomers observed the comet as it approached the Sun in a 5.3 Earth-year orbit around the star from January 29 to February 2, 2023, using NASA’s Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft. SOHO allowed them to produce a stunning sequence of images showing a series of fragments behind and in front of the cosmic snow globe.

A comet and its debris tail are no strangers to SOHO. In 2012, the Solar Observing Spacecraft detected two small fragments believed to have been launched by 96P Machholz during an earlier flyby of the Sun. When 96P Machholz made a return visit to the inner Solar System and SOHO’s field of view in 2017, the spacecraft noticed smaller fragments tracking the comet in its orbit.

This not only further supported the theory that 96P Machholz had undergone some disintegration in his recent past, but also prompted the California Institute of Technology’s (CalTech) planetary doctorate. student Qicheng Zhang and SOHO Principal Investigator Carl Battams to prepare for the comet’s next close approach in 2023.

They did this by first examining past images of SOHO comet using a new data processing technique developed by Zhang that better detects comet fragments in 2017 images. The archival footage clearly shows a slender, elongated trail of debris that perfectly follows the comet’s orbit, extending far ahead and behind the comet. It was something suspected, but it had never been observed optically from the ground or from space before.

Zhang and Battams then decided to observe the comet with a SOHO instrument called the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment (LASCO) when 96P Machholz came back into view in early 2023. This tool provides more exposure and color filters, which the team hopes will further improve the appearance of the extended debris path.

LASCO’s orange filter allows only a narrow range of wavelengths to be detected and is particularly sensitive to sodium, which is strongly emitted by near-sun comets such as 96P Machholz, as heat from the star causes matter to transform from solid to gas. around them.