A comet first spotted appeared when Chile and Argentina launched the total solar eclipse on 14 December 2020.
Just a small spot in the air, the comet, called C / 2020 X3 (SOHO), traveled about 720,000 km / h (720,000 km / h), about 4.3 million kilometers from the solar surface as the moon passed in front of our star.
Thai amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod first saw the comet on December 13 through the NASA-funded Sungrazer project, which helps amateurs search for and discover new comets in images of a joint European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA mission, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. (SOHO).
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Knowing that the eclipse would occur, Boonplod was interested to see if the newly identified comet would possibly appear in the sun’s outer atmosphere.
Behold, it has done; just around the time of the eclipse the comet rushes past. The object is a kind of comet called a “Kruetz” sungrazer, which means that it is a fragment of a much larger parent comet that broke up more than 1000 years ago and is still around the sun.
Comet hunters mostly find Kruetz sunbathers in SOHO images, mimicking total solar eclipses: a solid oscillating disk in the SOHO camera block the sun’s blinding light to reveal dimmer elements in the sun’s outer atmosphere. The comet that Boonplod found was the 3,534th known Kreutz sungrazer.
Unfortunately, the comet reached its end shortly after Boonplod discovered it. The icy rock, which was 150 meters in diameter (about 150 meters, or about the length of a semi-truck), disintegrated in dust for several hours before reaching the nearest point of the sun, without the intense solar radiation. .
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