Comet's fiery plunge may tell us how planets form

For the first time, scientists have caught a glimpse of a comet's final minutes before it was vaporized by the sun.?The comet was flying at about 1.4 million miles an hour.

For the first time, scientists have caught a comet in the Icarus-like act of zipping too close to the sun ? and watched as it paid the ultimate price.

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In catching a glimpse of the comet's final vaporization, researchers not only have been able to piece together a detailed picture of the comet itself ? something usually reserved for spacecraft fly-bys. They also may have a found a way to use similar comets as test dummies for making key measurements of the sun's atmosphere, or corona.

And by throwing the break-up process into reverse, they may be able to answer a nagging question tied to the formation of planets in the solar system some 4.5 billion years ago: How does the clumping process that gathers tiny dust grains into ever bigger lumps and finally to planet-size objects really work?

The comet observations, published in the Jan. 20 issue of the journal Science, "are pioneering a new form of cometary study," writes Carey Lisse, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

The comet, C/2011 N3, was discovered July 4, 2011, a scant two days before its demise, as researchers looked at data from the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft, a joint NASA-European Space Agency project.

Sun-grazing comets, such as C/2011 N3, are nothing new to SOHO. It has observed more than 2,100 of them, according to NASA. It finds them with an instrument designed to mask the sun's disk so the instrument can observe the glowing corona.

But that's also a problem. Sun-grazers SOHO sees vanish behind this mask. And like Las Vegas, what goes on behind the mask stays behind the mask.

It took data from three craft ? SOHO, as well as NASA's STEREO and Solar Dynamics Observatory ? to piece together the full picture of C/2011 N3's final 20 minutes.

The C/2011 N3 belongs to a family known as Kreutz sungrazers ? a vast collection of comet fragments thought to have come from the break-up of a larger comet around 2,500 years ago. Scientists estimate that the parent object's nucleus was as large as 60 miles across. Comet Halley, which makes its closest approach to the sun every 75 years, has a nucleus roughly 7 miles across.

Based on its observations, the team, led by Lockheed Martin Corporation solar physicist Karel Schrijver, estimates that C/2011 N3 was hurtling toward the sun at about 1.4 million miles an hour ? fast enough to turn a three-day trip to the moon into a four-hour sprint. When it vanished, it had closed within 62,000 miles of the sun's surface.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/vVYBZ8PIa4U/Comet-s-fiery-plunge-may-tell-us-how-planets-form

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