Scientists watch as comet is ‘roasted to death’ – and see unexpected results

Astronomers have watched as a comet near the Sun was roasted to death.

It is the first time such a comet has been seen as it disintegrated, researchers say.

And it could also explain why it is such a rare kind of comet, indicating that they are being destroyed by something before they finally crash into the Sun.

Scientists have long found it difficult to understand why there are so few objects that fall on orbits that bring them towards the Sun. They are difficult to see, because they are so close to our bright star, but even then there seems to be fewer than expected.

Scientists hope to help solve that difficulty by following one of those rare near-Sun comets, named 323P/SOHO. They used a huge array of telescopes, and even with that found it difficult to track the object across the sky.

Researchers eventually caught it with a ground-based telescope, and used those observations to better understand where it was likely to be. That meant that they could be waiting as it came back away from the Sun.

When it did, however, it was a very different object. Before, it was a dot, but after it showed a long tail of dust coming out of its back; scientists think that the Sun roasted it in such a way as to crack it apart, leaving it trailing parts of its self across the solar system.

But the observations actually le to more of a mystery. The object is spinning around quickly, two times an hour, and it has a colour like nothing else seen in our Solar System.

Scientists now hope to better understand the object and those like it to see if it is unusual among its fellow near-Sun objects.

The findings are described in a paper, ‘The Lingering Death of Periodic Near-Sun Comet 323P/SOHO’, published in Astronomical Journal.