A doomed comet met its fiery end as it crashed into the Sun over the weekend.
Coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) recorded its death dive, which began on August 6th.
On Sunday, an updated video showed the comet crashing into the sun and most likely being obliterated as reported by SpaceWeather.com.
According to astronomer Tony Phillips, the doomed comet was most likely a ‘Kreutz sungrazer’, a family of sungrazing comets, characterised by orbits taking them extremely close to the Sun.
They are usually fragments from a giant comet that broke apart centuries ago and orbit the sun.
This event was captured by the Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) which is a collaboration between the ESA and Nasa to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer corona and the solar wind.
The resulting images from SOHO captured late Saturday and early Sunday showed the comet being pulled into the Sun’s intense gravity.
It eventually can be seen disappearing into the Sun and is expected to have been fully vaporized by the intense heat.
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The footage also showed the flurry of activity on the Sun’s surface recently with a solar storm affecting the Earth even last week.
Such solar events are likely to become more frequent in the coming months, according to the NOAA due to the sun’s cycle of activity.
Comets are balls of ice and dust that are thought to originate from the outer edges of our solar system in a cold, dark region known as the Oort cloud.
Many are on very long orbital paths that bring them close to the inner solar system once every few decades or even centuries.
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