Hey look if you divebombed the Sun every 4 years you'd probably blow chunks too.
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2/ This comet, 323P/SOHO, has such a narrow elliptical orbit it gets as far out as Jupiter but then scream down to the Sun and passes just *5 million kilometers* from the surface.
That's like sticking your head in a blast furnace. It's amazing it's survived this long.
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3/ But this behavior is not without consequences. The last time the <200-meter-wide comet passed, in 2021, astronomers trained a bunch of telescopes at it. Hubble saw it that fractured, blowing out two chunks as big as houses. A dust tail of debris bloomed from it, too.
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4/ Here's the Hubble pic; the chunks are labeled A and B. The comet was moving to the upper left, and the Sun was to the lower right. From the paper Man-To Hui et al (2022): iopscience.iop.org/article/10.384
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5/ It also changed colors during this event. Releasing a lot of dust would tend to make it look redder, but some parts got redder and some got bluer and it doesn't make sense. This line was actually in the paper, a first to me:
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6/ It gets so much weirder. This is likely a dead comet with no water left in it, so it might resemble the dry asteroids Bennu and Ryugu. Just a gossamer colelction of incredibly porous and fragile rocks you could crush with a whisper. But it plunges within a hair of the Sun!
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7/7 So read all about this bizarre object that actually may be pretty common in the solar system: A burned out comet that's more like an asteroid but behaves like a comet again — temporarily — when it decides to get a little too personal with the Sun.
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