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Comet C/2011 W3 Lovejoy is the first Kreuz-family "suicide-into-the-Sun" comet observed from the ground (= not discovered by a satelite looking at the Sun) since 1970 thanks to the amazingness of Terry Lovejoy.
The story behind this comet is immense and I have been lucky to be a small part of it, you can read a lot of deailts on it on a dedicated page set by the SOHO and STEREO people :
http://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index.php?p=news/birthday_comet
If people are interested, I can make later a short writeup about what does it take to take the first ever ground-based CCD photometry of a Sun-grazing comet in history, but...
... but right now it is not the time to talk, but to watch! The comet is already in the field of view of SOHO:
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/c3/512/
Sadly, the images are not updated - but lulckily it is because they are observing the comer MORE and have sacrifiiced the real-timedness for MORE images.
The SDO has also prepared a campaing, they will actually move the satelite to look at the comet instead of the Sun in an hour. Watch live:
http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/data/lovejoy.php
This comet has really brought me a lot of excitement in the last week. It is an amazing feeling to "be there" when something amazing is happening. The pictures we took are now featured at spaceweather.com and space.com. As a special treat for TL readers, I provide you with the link to the fullres (5 MB) version of the pictures from 6,7,8,10 and 11 Dec (left to right). Please, click it only if you are interested, do not kill my bandwidth, thanks 
http://ccd.wz.cz/w3.jpg
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SOHO has some updated images. The comet is well inside C2, only tail is left in C3. SDO should show some images in 10 minutes.
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pretty sweet! thanks for sharing!
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This is awesome. Thank you for the pictures and the story. I can't imagine how much hard work this represents. You are my hero.
+ Show Spoiler +Wish I could phrase this better, but seriously, so cool!
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The SDO trick worked, they are now looking a little left from the Sun. First images are here, choose at the yellow Sun at the top of the list. But no comet yet there.
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Yes, now it is there quite clear. I really imagined it very differently
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whooohooo our sun is sexy dear lord
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It's very nice, thanks for sharing it with us!
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thank you good sir, that was really interesting... now we have to wait if it comes back out on the other side, or if the comet is gone forever
is there any knowledge about the history of the comet? it seems extemely unlikely for some random object to get this close to the sun, and if it's a constant orbit how did it survive the last time it passed the sun, and how was it formed initially?
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It almost certainly won't come out. Almost no sungrazer does - the conditions are fierce so close to the Sun.
The comet is a part of a huge family (now more than a thousand, iirc) of Kreutz comets. They have a pretty decenty wikipedia page:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreutz_Sungrazers
edit: to be honest, there was some hope that this will be a HUGE commet (read Ikeya-Seki huge) and will survive and be seen by naked eye in daylight, but it was a very faint hope indeed. It never brightened so much, the core of the comet was just not big enough.
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Amazing footage! According to those timestamps at the bottom, roughly 2 frames are taken per minute which makes the comet appear to be moving much faster than it actually does. I wish that telescope could zoom in even closer!
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Awesome pictures of the sun.
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On December 16 2011 10:02 opisska wrote:It almost certainly won't come out. Almost no sungrazer does - the conditions are fierce so close to the Sun. The comet is a part of a huge family (now more than a thousand, iirc) of Kreutz comets. They have a pretty decenty wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kreutz_Sungrazers edit: to be honest, there was some hope that this will be a HUGE commet (read Ikeya-Seki huge) and will survive and be seen by naked eye in daylight, but it was a very faint hope indeed. It never brightened so much, the core of the comet was just not big enough.
It seems that the comet DID come out the other side. It lives on!
http://twitter.com/intent/user?screen_name=NASA_SDO (source)
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Well I really think that Naniwa shoul- Oh wait, a thread that's not about that? I approve ^^
Great pictures :D
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On December 16 2011 08:04 ToT)OjKa( wrote:
That'll teach it
I'm sure the sun learned its lesson.
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I've never seen pictures of the sun like this. I don't know what I'm looking at, and where's the comet in them lol
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simply amazing, thanks for sharing!
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On December 16 2011 10:25 intrigue wrote:omg! the gifs are SO COOL. was the comet surviving a very unexpected outcome? how often does this usually occur? can you explain what i'm looking at here? + Show Spoiler +edited image-url to show the one referred to in this post: ![[image loading]](http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov//data/REPROCESSING/Completed/2011/c3/20111215/20111215_2230_c3_512.jpg)
Since comets are usually big chunks of ice (not just frozen water, but also dry ice, frozen methane and other stuff) it's not uncommon for them to evaporate when they get too close to the sun. Also the gravitational forces are really strong when they get that close to the sun, so they tend to break into smaller pieces (which is how this comet was initially formed), and smaller pieces melt and evaporate even faster. Considering Lovejoy was not that big of a comet most people expected it to "not make it", but apparently it did.
As for the picture: it was taken by a camera specifically made to observe the corona of the sun. The sun itself is in the center and indicated by the white circle, but they put a disc in front of the camera to create an artificial eclipse, otherwise the light coming directly from the sun would oversaturate the picture and you couldn't see anything on it. The black stripe on the top right is probably some fixture to hold the disc.
The comet can (or rather can't) be seen in the bottom left, leaving a bright tail of dust behind, but also a dim tail of ions just to the left of the bright tail. The ions are affected by solar winds and therefore "blown away" while the dust is just left behind marking the trail of the comet.
You can see the comet in this picture taken earlier (the comet is so bright it oversaturates the camera, which leads to horizontal bars, it does not actually have the shape seen in this picture):
![[image loading]](http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov//data/REPROCESSING/Completed/2011/c3/20111215/20111215_1630_c3_512.jpg)
Also some youtube videos from SDO:
+ Show Spoiler +Lovejoy entering the sun's atmosphere Lovejoy emerging from behind the sun:
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The comet SURVIVED!
That it, like, the most exciting thing in astronomy I have ever seen realtime. Noone believed that!!
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Wait what, it flew through the sun and survived?
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It did not fly literarly through the Sun, but the last number I have seen is 50 000 km above the photosphere and that is basically, still in the Sun (the Sun has not definitive boundary, it is made of gas, what we see is the photoshpere, which happens to be the first layer that we cannot see through). But the outer layers fo the Sun have very low density, so it was able to survive, thanks to flying fast and nto being there too long.
It happened before, but with much larger comets, they had enough mass that something was left. But most of the people did not expect this one to be big enough, by far.
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Got to love that sling-shot maneuver... I wonder how fast it was going.
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Whew, close call for us...
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You must have a freakin awesome job.
Thanks for sharing! Great pictures!
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Thank you so much for sharing this, sometimes the general forum throws up a gem like this - thanks!
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If Star Trek has taught us anything, it just went back in time.
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On December 17 2011 00:09 Antisocialmunky wrote:
If Star Trek has taught us anything, it just went back in time.
that was stargate btw ;P in star trek you go back in time through arbitrary wormholes. The loop-around-the-sun-wormhole-time travel is stargate. 
</scifinerd>
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Amazing clips and gifs! How did it survive...wow! Imagine the speed of that comet...
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The pictures from C2 finaly arrived. (Be vary that this "simple" way to see after each other them will be lost in a few hours as they will become older and the link will be showing "boring" Sun.)
The interesting thing is, how dim the comet was after the solar passage and that it started to brighten only a couple o hours later. From what I heard from the astronomical community, this commet will require some serious work to make it in line with theoretical models.
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Thanks for sharing! I would have probably never heard about this amazing event otherwise.
Thanks
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What would have happened if this comet hit the earth?
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On December 16 2011 20:54 Warri wrote:
Wait what, it flew through the sun and survived?
Dear god it must be an extraterrestrial spaceship with super sun resistance!
Man seriously this is so cool thank you so much never knew about this :D
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On December 17 2011 04:45 RoosterSamurai wrote:
What would have happened if this comet hit the earth?
First, it is extremely unlikely. There are many other object with far more probablility of hitting the Earth than a Kreutz comet. Their orbit is so much wrong for ever coming really close to Earth.
Second, this quesiton is interesting, because it raises another question: how big is the nucleus of the comet? Honestly, nobody knows. The comet is so intruiging that normal estimates do not apply well. To now about the ballpark: largest ever osberved comets have tens of kilometers (almost certainly not the case here), smallest maybe some hundreds of meters. The actual "comet" is many orders of magnitude bigger, as it is just a huge cloud of gas evaporated from the nucleus, but its density is very low, it is comparable to the "vacuum" we create in our labs on Earth.
Anyway, if the nucleus is in the range of kilometers, we could be talking about something only a little less dramatic than dinosaur extinction. But to repeat, this is not going to happen. If something from space is gonna kill us, it is something we do not know at the moment, with a very different trajectory than a Kreutz comet.
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On December 17 2011 02:29 MisterD wrote:Show nested quote +On December 17 2011 00:09 Antisocialmunky wrote:
If Star Trek has taught us anything, it just went back in time. that was stargate btw ;P in star trek you go back in time through arbitrary wormholes. The loop-around-the-sun-wormhole-time travel is stargate. </scifinerd>
Nope, the save the whales movie.
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EPT
![[image loading]](http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/realtime/c3/512/latest.jpg)
