NASA’s STEREO A spacecraft has spotted a powerful eruption on the Sun ripping the tail off comet Pons-Brooks, although it quickly regrew. This is far from the first time STEREO A has spotted the Sun toying with a dirty snowball like this, but the images are particularly dramatic.
Comet tails are wispy things caused when the solar wind pushes the gas and dust released by subliming ice away from the comet’s head. It doesn’t take a lot to disrupt them; you sometimes see comets with
When solar flares lift
The STEREO spacecraft don’t just watch comet tails for fun. As the their website
As their name suggests, the STEREO spacecraft were designed to provide twin views of solar activity, one with an orbit a few weeks shorter than the Earth, the other a little longer. The usually long baseline between them gave NASA unprecedented insight into solar activity for a decade but contact was lost with STEREO B in 2016, and even once recovered attempts to restore it failed.
STEREO A has kept plugging along, even if the acronym is now inaccurate. Its full name is Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory A, and it has continued to help astronomers understand how the Sun’s variability affects the Earth. As these images show, it does the same for other components of the Solar System.
On April 12, STEREO A spotted a major CME lift off the Sun. This event was headed almost directly opposite to the Earth, so did not trigger any auroras here, although another one around the same time
The effect was so strong in part because the CME was so powerful, but also because Pons-Brooks was 120 million kilometers (75 million miles) from the Sun, 80 percent of the Earth’s distance. Although from STEREO A’s perspective the comet looks like it is almost touching Jupiter, the giant planet was almost a billion kilometers (620 million miles) further away, and would have been barely affected.
Pons-Brooks hasn’t really been living up to its nickname recently. It got the “Devil’s Comet” tag because on its way in it exploded several times (as it has done on previous visits) and some of these produced what looked like
The good news is that, while comets are often