Two
"Sungrazing" comets are seen heading in tandem towards the Sun's
corona. They do not reappear on the other side. The comets follow similar
but not identical orbits and enter the tenuous outer atmosphere of the Sun.
Shortly after the comets disappeared behind the occulting disks of the coronagraph,
a bright helical-shape prominence erupts from the Sun as part of a coronal
mass ejection. Comets, composed of ice and dust, characteristically have
particles streaming out behind them. Comets can be found zooming around
space quite frequently.
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The observations of the comets and the large erupting prominence were made
by the LASCO coronagraph on the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO)
spacecraft. Science instruments on SOHO have discovered more than 50 comets,
including many so-called sun grazers, but none in such close succession. |
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