• What is a sungrazing comet?

    Sungrazing comets are a special class of comets that come very close to the Sun at their nearest approach, a point called perihelion. To be considered a sungrazer, a comet needs to get within about 850,000 miles from the sun at perihelion. Many come even closer, even

  • Sungrazing comet and farside full-halo CME

    An icy comet with estimated size of few tens of meters plunged into the Sun on August 19/20, 2013 but just before it dissipated, a far-side region on the Sun expelled a magnificent full-halo CME.

    Today's comet belonged to Kreutz Sungrazer family which

  • Sungrazing comet visible on SOHO Lasco C3 imagery today

    A small comet is diving toward the Sun today, August 19, 2013 and is visible on SOHO Lasco C3 imagery. It entered visual field of Lasco C3 coronagraph at 07:54 UTC on August 18th.

    The comet belongs to Kreutz Sungrazer family. Those

  • NPP sees aftermath of the Chelyabinsk meteor

    A meteor weighing 10,000 metric tons exploded only 23km above the city of Chelyabinsk in Russia on February 15, 2013. Unlike previous such events, this time scientists had the highly sensitive OMPS instrument on NPP to deliver unprecedented data and help them track and

  • 40 year old Magellanic Stream mystery solved

    Astronomers using the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope have solved the 40-year-old mystery of the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a long ribbon of gas stretching nearly halfway around the Milky Way. New Hubble observations reveal that most of this stream was stripped

  • SDO Lunar transit (August 6, 2013)

    For almost 1 1/2 hours the Moon made an appearance in NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory's view on August 6, 2013. The Moon itself looks much bigger than the Sun – as the Moon is many times closer to Earth (and to SDO) than the Sun

  • Magnetic pole reversal of the Sun 3 – 4 months away

    As it does approximately every 11 years on a solar cycle, the Sun's magnetic field is now reversing. Measurements have confirmed that we are about 3 – 4 months away from complete magnetic field reversal when Sun's inner magnetic dynamo will re-organize itself.