Physicists get unique view of devastating comet

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When C/2019 Y4 ATLAS disintegrated in April 2020, many were horrified at the loss of what would become the brightest comet since Hale-Bopp’s death in 1997. But NASA and the European Space Agency only flew close to what was left of Atlas. , giving scientists a rare glimpse into what happens to a comet’s tail when it no longer lags behind anything.

First observed in December 2019, ATLAS had been on the space agency’s radar for a while and was visible to the naked eye in May 2020, but quickly got brighter in the previous month and It collapsed before it happened. The Hubble Space Telescope captured the comet’s disintegration, revealing the imaginary glow of the comet’s fragment when it was still 91 million miles from Earth. The pieces are the size of almost every house, and together they resemble the headlights of a deep-sea submarine.

While the comet’s disintegration was disappointing in some ways, the comet’s tail got stuck around it, so a solar probe was asked to examine what was left. (After all, it had to be in the area, so it was a mission with enough space to run.) The research team made aggregate measurements The remains of the Atlas youSing all the instruments in place of the Solar Orbiter: active particle detectors, magnetometers, radio and plasma wave experiments, and solar wind analyzers. A full description of the Solar Orbiter payload is available at ESA website.

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Comets are famous for their iconic dust tails that drift away from the nucleus. But the corpse too ion tail, which is usually much fainter and comes from the interaction of cometary gases with the solar wind. That magnetometer surya orbital Crucial to the team’s observations, it required local magnetic field measurements, allowing the team to work out how the comet’s tail magnetic field interacts with the magnetic field carried by the solar wind through the solar system.