SOHO Spacecraft sees two Comets plunge into Sun			1 June 2002
			In a rare celestial spectacle, two comets have been observed plunging into the Sun's atmosphere in close succession, on June 1 and 2. This unusual event on Earth's own star was followed on June 2 by a likely unrelated but also dramatic ejection of solar gas and magnetic fields on the southwest (or lower right) limb of the Sun.
			Go to full text
Credit: Courtesy of SOHO/[instrument] consortium. SOHO is a project of international cooperation between ESA and NASA
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.		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.
			Return to top of page