Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks (far left) was recently hit by a sudden massive coronal mass ejection. Jupiter is also seen in a new video of the event. (Image: NASA/STEREO-A)
The exploding "Demon Comet" was blasted away by a giant wave of plasma from the sun, temporarily blowing away its dusty tail. A NASA spacecraft captured the epic encounter in a new video, which also features a distant Jupiter.
Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks (12P) is a green cryovolcanic comet with a 17-km-wide nucleus. It occasionally erupts, spewing a mixture of icy gas and dust into the solar system whenever it absorbs too much solar radiation. When this happens, its chaos zone – the cloud of particles surrounding the nucleus – expands and becomes much brighter. In the past, this bright cloud was distorted from within, giving the comet the “horns” that earned it the nickname “demon.” However, these horns have disappeared during recent outbursts.
12P orbits the sun about every 71 years in an elliptical, or elongated, orbit. The comet spends most of its life in the outer reaches of our cosmic neighborhood, out of the reach of telescopes. However, it is now making its final dash toward the sun, and will reach its closest point to Earth, known as perihelion, on April 22. It will then zip around our host star and retreat to the edge of the solar system – if it doesn’t burn up during this close encounter first.
War in the sky
On April 12, the comet was hit by a giant cloud of plasma called a coronal mass ejection (CME) that exploded from the sun without warning. The incident caused a disconnection, in which the comet’s dusty tail was temporarily blown away by the solar storm before rising again.
Disconnection events are rare, but they become more likely as comets get closer to the sun. The same thing happened to Comet Nishimura in September 2023, when a CME blew off the comet's tail as it circled the sun — just as 12P will do this week. And in January 2023, an astrophotographer captured time-lapse footage of the same thing happening to the green comet C/2022 E3 .
This isn’t the first time 12P has been spotted near another celestial body on its journey through the solar system. The explosive comet was also photographed flying through the Crimson Crescent Nebula in January and streamed live as it zoomed past the Andromeda Galaxy in March.
There was also hope that 12P might appear during the recent total solar eclipse. However, it proved extremely difficult to spot because the moon temporarily blocked out the sun.
According to Live Science
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