Comet Encke's Tail Ripped Off

I thought this was rather cool!

I converted from gif to avi. The original is about 7 seconds long. This video is 1 minute, so the gif repeats several times. Sorry no sound.

Quote directly from APOD. Links below.

"Explanation: Swinging inside the orbit of Mercury, on April 20th periodic comet Encke encountered a blast from the Sun in the form of a Coronal Mass Ejection (CME). When CMEs, enormous clouds of energetic particles ejected from the Sun, slam into Earth's magnetosphere, they often trigger auroral displays. But in this case, the collison carried the tail of the comet away. The tail was likely ripped off by interacting magnetic fields rather than the mechanical pressure of the collision. Clicking on the two panel image will play a movie gif of the remarkable event as recorded by the Heliospheric Imager onboard the STEREO A spacecraft. In the movie, the time between frames is about 45 minutes, while the frames span about 14x20 million kilometers at the distance of the comet. Of course, similar collisions have happened before as the ancient comet loops through its 3.3 year solar orbit. So don't worry, Encke's tail grows back!"

Credit: Angelos Vourlidas (NRL) et al., SECCHI / STEREO, NASA

Angelos Vourlidas (NRL) et al
http://secchi.nrl.navy.mil/Publications/Vourlidas_encke_07.pdf

SECCHI
http://secchi.nrl.navy.mil/

STEREO
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/

NASA
http://www.nasa.gov/

APOD
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Comet
• Encke
• tail
• ripped
• apod
• Angelos
• Vourlidas
• NRL
• SECCHI
• STEREO
• NASA

[HikaruYunibasaru]

@HikaruYunibasaru The tail forms when the sun partially melts it during the time it approches the sun so when we see it in the sky, it is easy to spot due to its tail. Comets are beautiful but in ancient times, they represent bad omens however i don't really belive that.

[chunfu2]

Where's the Comet???

[gooser1981]

cool video, I'll upload footage later of grass growing.

[alezander666]

PLEASE EXPLAIN,i am not a physicist,or knowledgeable in these matters,I HAVE HEARD THE CORE OF COMETS,ARE COLD,HOW THE HELL AND WHAT PROPELS THEM,DO WE JUST NOT KNOW,DOES ICE MAKE ENERGY,NO,HEAT DOES,WHAT PROPELS THESE WIERD THINGS

[Plutonwolf]

Like the side bar says, the tail was stripped due to magnetics because a purely mechanical effect would have stripped the existing tail, but it would have replaced it with a possibly larger one fron the head of the comet.

Sweet vid, thanks for the share!

[TheRealSnedz]

Thats mint. Those solar winds are lethal arnt they. Theyr like 400 to 800 kms arnt they? WOW

[dfarmer1584]

That was very cool. Thanks for posting it.

[RobAlone]

It is cool.