{"id":779645,"date":"2024-03-27T10:03:01","date_gmt":"2024-03-27T15:03:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=779645"},"modified":"2024-03-27T10:03:01","modified_gmt":"2024-03-27T15:03:01","slug":"esa-nasa-solar-observatory-discovers-its-5000th-comet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=779645","title":{"rendered":"ESA, NASA Solar Observatory Discovers Its 5,000th Comet"},"content":{"rendered":"


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4 min read<\/p>\n

ESA, NASA Solar Observatory Discovers Its 5,000th Comet<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

On March 25, 2024, a citizen scientist in the Czech Republic spotted a comet in an image from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, which has now been confirmed to be the 5,000th<\/sup> comet discovered using SOHO data. SOHO has achieved this milestone over 28 years in space, even though it was never designed to be a comet hunter.<\/p>\n

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The 5,000th<\/sup> comet discovered with the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft is noted by a small white box in the upper left portion of this image. A zoomed-in inset shows the comet as a faint dot between the white vertical lines. The image was taken on March 25, 2024, by SOHO\u2019s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), which uses a disk to block the bright Sun and reveal faint features around it.<\/div>\n
NASA\/ESA\/SOHO<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The comet is a small body made of ice and rock that takes only a few years to orbit the Sun. It belongs to the \u201cMarsden group\u201d of comets. This group is thought to be related to comet 96P\/Machholz (which\u00a0SOHO observes when Machholz passes near the Sun every 5.3 years) and is named for the late scientist Brian Marsden who first recognized the group using SOHO observations. Only about 75 of the 5,000 comets discovered with SOHO belong to the Marsden group.<\/p>\n

A joint mission of ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA, SOHO launched in December 1995 to study the Sun and the dynamics in its outer atmosphere, called the corona. A science instrument on SOHO, called the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), uses an artificial disk to block the blinding light of the Sun so scientists can study the corona and environment immediately around the Sun.<\/p>\n

This also allows SOHO to do something many other spacecraft cannot \u2013 see comets flying close to the Sun, known as \u201csungrazing\u201d comets or \u201csungrazers.\u201d Many of these comets only brighten when they\u2019re too close to the Sun for other observatories to see and would otherwise go undetected, lost in the bright glare of our star. While scientists expected SOHO to serendipitously find some comets during its mission, the spacecraft\u2019s ability to spot them has made it the most prolific comet-finder in history \u2013 discovering more than half of the comets known today.<\/p>\n

In fact, soon after SOHO launched, people around the world began spotting so many comets in its images that mission scientists needed a way to keep track of them all. In the early 2000s, they launched the NASA-funded Sungrazer Project that allows anyone to report comets they find in SOHO images.<\/p>\n

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