Official News page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: COMET LOSES TAIL TO STORM

by Hazed

Even enormous heavenly bodies can suffer storm damage, as images captured by NASA's STEREO satellite show. The mission, whose task is to examine the surface of the sun, shows what happens when a comet runs into a severe solar storm - it gets its tail ripped off!

The series of images, which scientists have combined into a movie which you can watch here, shows the tail of comet Encke brighten considerably as the highly-charged solar material sweeps past. The tail is then detached and carried away by the ejected solar mass.

"This is the first time we've witnessed a collision between a coronal mass ejection and a comet and the surprise of seeing the disconnection of the tail was the icing on the cake," said the lead author of an article about this phenomenon, Angelos Vourlidas from the Naval Research Laboratory. While scientists have known for a while that comets can lose their plasma tails, they had no idea why it happened. Coronal mass ejections were one of the possibilities, but there was no proof they were the cause - until now.

CMEs are vast quanities of solar matter - billions of tons at a time - hurled from the surface of the sun at speeds of more than 2,000 miles a second. On reaching Earth they can wreak havoc with radio communications and power stations. It seems they also have a serious effect on comets, too!

Fed2 Star index Previous issues Fed 2 home page