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A comet first spotted the day before made an appearance as Chile and Argentina watched the total solar eclipse December 14, 2020.
Just a small dot in the sky, the comet, nicknamed C / 2020 X3 (SOHO), was traveling at about 450,000 km / h (720,000 km / h), about 4.3 million kilometers from the surface of the sun when the moon passed in front of our star.
Thai amateur astronomer Worachate Boonplod first saw the comet on December 13 via the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project, which is helping hobbyists search for and discover new comets in images from a joint mission from the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. (SOHO).
Related: Amazing photos of comet NEOWISE from Earth and space
Knowing that the eclipse was coming, Boonplod was interested to see if the newly identified comet might appear in the sun’s outer atmosphere.
And behold, it happened; around the time of the eclipse, the comet was rushing forward. The object is a type of comet called a sungrazer “Kruetz”, which means that it is a fragment of a much larger mother comet that broke up over 1000 years ago and continues to fall apart. ‘orbit around the Sun.
Comet hunters most often find Kruetz sungrazers in SOHO images, which mimic total solar eclipses: a solid oscillating disk in the SOHO camera blocked the sthe blinding light of the UN to reveal darker features in the sun’s outer atmosphere. The comet that Boonplod found was the 3,534th known Kreutz sungrazer.
Sadly, the comet ended shortly after Boonplod discovered it. The icy rock, which was 50 feet in diameter (150 meters, or about the length of a semi-truck), disintegrated into dust hours before reaching its closest point to the sun, unable to withstand the intense solar radiation.
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