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Cometary Suicides

Cometary Suicides
Cometary Suicides An orbiting telescope designed to study the Sun has also proved effective at finding comets. Professional and amateur comet-hunters alike are detecting comet after comet in data returned by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). This image of a comet plunging into the Sun's corona was taken on December 23, 1996 by the Large Angle Spectrometric Coronograph (LASCO) on SOHO. Better known as the "Christmas Comet," SOHO-6 was, as its name suggests, the sixth comet found by the spacecraft. The solid orange area at bottom is a mask to block out the brilliant disk of the Sun. NASA/European Space Agency (ESA)