Image credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO/Joy Ng.ESA and NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, or SOHO, saw a bright comet plunge toward the Sun on 3-4 August 2016, at nearly 1.3 million miles per hour. Comets are chunks of ice and dust that orbit the Sun, usually on highly elliptical orbits that carry them far beyond the orbit of Pluto at their farthest points. This comet, first spotted by SOHO on 1 August, is part of the Kreutz family of comets, a group with related orbits that broke off of a huge comet several centuries ago.
This comet didn’t fall into the Sun, but rather whipped around it – or at least, it would have if it had survived its journey. Like most sungrazing comets, this comet was torn apart and vaporised by the intense forces near the Sun.
The disc of the Sun is represented by the white circle in this looping animation.
It seems that the more we see of Pluto, the more fascinating it gets. This latest image, from the heart of Pluto’s heart feature, shows the plains’ enigmatic cellular pattern as well as unusual clusters of small pits and troughs. Adding to the intrigue is that even at this resolution of 250 metres, no impact craters are seen, testifying to the region’s extreme geologic youth.
A subsurface ocean lies deep within Saturn’s moon Dione, according to new data from the Cassini mission. Two other moons of Saturn, Titan and Enceladus, are already known to hide global oceans beneath their icy crusts. Researchers believe that Dione’s crust floats on an ocean several tens of kilometres deep located 100 kilometres below the surface.