The magenta arc indicates Lovejoy's path, which traversed both open (orange) and closed (blue) magnetic field lines.
The unexpected directions and changes in tail motion were found to be consistent with the orientation and variation of the magnetic field along this path, which was determined from a sophisticated computer model of the solar corona. Credit: Cooper Downs
A team of researchers studying comet Lovejoy has discovered that as the ball of ice passed through the sun's corona in December 2011, its tail wiggled in a way that allowed them to better understand coronal magnetism.
In their paper published in the journal Science, the team says observations of Lovejoy's close call with the sun have helped them improve models used to describe the irregular nature of coronal magnetism.
Comet Lovejoy is part of a class of comet's known as Kreutz sungrazers—they are believed to be remnants of a much larger comet that broke apart hundreds of years ago.
They're called sungrazers because they have a tendency to strike the sun's corona at an angle. Most break apart and disappear—Lovejoy did not.
Instead it spun around the sun at very high velocity and shot back out into space, only to break apart several days later. Sungrazers offer researchers a unique way to study the sun's corona—it's too hot to send a probe—temperatures typically hover in the millions of degrees.
Instead they can watch what happens to comets as they are impacted by intense temperatures and magnetism.
More information:
Probing the Solar Magnetic Field with a Sun-Grazing Comet, Science 7 June 2013: Vol. 340 no. 6137 pp. 1196-1199 DOI: 10.1126/science.1236550
Read more of this story at Phys.org
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