EMBARGOED FOR Editor's Note: This story was updated at 3:58 p.m. ET on Jan. 27 to reflect the latest times concerning the comet's prime visibility, as provided by NASA.
A recently discovered comet now rounding the Sun is wowing Web surfers and will be visible through early Friday on the Internet. The images are beamed to Earth by the Sun-watching Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spacecraft.
The best views will come early Tuesday, SPACE.com has learned.
"Everyone with an Internet connection can follow this spectacular event from their living rooms," said Paal Brekke, SOHO's deputy project scientist from the European Space Agency. Brekke works out of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. SOHO, joint project of the two agencies, is used primarily to study and forecast space weather.
Regularly updated images show the comet, named Kudo-Fujikawa for its co-discoverers, closing in on our solar system's central star. The comet cannot be seen from Earth now, because it is so close to the Sun that the sunlight it reflects is drowned out by the overall solar glare. SOHO sits partway between Earth and the Sun, and it masks the Sun's disk so that it can make useful images of the matter and energy that billows from it.
The comet should be visible in SOHO images until around 9:30 a.m. ET (1430 UT) Friday, Jan 31, based on the most recent NASA calculations provided to SPACE.com.
Kudo-Fujikawa is passing inside the orbit of Mercury, the innermost planet. On Wednesday it will make its closest approach, about 17.7 million miles (28.4 million kilometers) from the Sun, before starting its swing back out through the solar system, beyond Earth. Many comets carve such highly elliptical paths on orbits that can take anywhere from a few years to a few hundred years to complete.
SOHO has actually been used to make initial discoveries of other comets, about 500 of them. Most were destroyed shortly after their discovery, swallowed by the Sun.
"It will not plunge to a fiery death like all the sungrazers we've seen," Brekke said of comet Kudo-Fujikawa.
The Sun is boiling off part of the comet's outer surface, however. This material glows with reflected sunlight, generating the glowing head, or coma, and a tail seen in the SOHO images. The tail always points away from the Sun, blown spaceward by the tremendous wind of energized particles constantly streaming from the burning star.
Also labeled C/2002 X5, the comet had been visible in binoculars and small telescopes since its discovery in December. After looping around the Sun, it will emerge in Earth's evening sky in late February, but only for skywatchers in the Southern Hemisphere.
About once or twice a year, astronomers know in advance of a comet that will pass within SOHO's field of view. Among the most celebrated was comet Hyakutake in 1996. This comet was also plainly visible with the naked eye from Earth for a time.
Comet Kudo-Fujikawa is presently visible on new and archived images from SOHO's LASCO C3 camera [See animation near top-right of this page]. It has moved down from the top of the scene and is approaching the Sun. During the week it will move alongside the Sun, on the right, and then move toward the bottom of the scene.
The best views are expected to come when the comet is imaged by LASCO C2. Gareth Lawrence, a LASCO scientist, gave the rough times as follows: Between 1 a.m. ET (0600 UT) and 1 p.m. ET (1800 UT) on Tuesday, Jan 28. Thereafter, the bulk of the energy will go back to snapping and uploading LASCO 3 images.
Images may not always appear right away, Lawrence said, because of the manual work required to get them online. But some real-time pictures should be posted, with the remainder following quickly, he said.
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