When C/2019 Y4 ATLAS fragmented in April 2020, many have been dismayed on the lack of what would’ve been the brightest comet for the reason that 1997 passing of Hale-Bopp. But NASA and the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter simply flew close to what’s left of ATLAS, giving scientists a uncommon have a look at what occurs to a comet’s tail when it’s now not tailing something.

First noticed in December 2019, ATLAS was on the house companies’ radars for some time and would have been seen to the bare eye in May 2020, however it grew quickly brighter within the previous month and crumbled earlier than that would occur. The comet’s breakup was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, which revealed a phantasmal glow from the comet’s items after they was nonetheless 91 million miles from Earth. The bits are roughly the dimensions of a home every, and collectively they resemble the headlights of a submersible within the deep sea.

While the comet’s disintegration was a disappointment in some methods, the comet’s tail has caught round, and so the Solar Orbiter was enlisted to take a look at what was left. (It was going to be within the space anyway, so it was a handy sufficient house errand to run.) The analysis staff took mixed measurements of ATLAS’ remnants using all of Solar Orbiter’s in-situ devices: its energetic particle detector, magnetometer, radio and plasma waves experiment, and photo voltaic wind analyzer. Full descriptions of the Solar Orbiter’s payload can be found on the ESA’s website.

Comets are most identified for his or her iconic mud tail, which streaks away from the nucleus. But the our bodies even have ion tails, that are a sometimes fainter and are available from the comet’s gasoline interacting with the photo voltaic wind. The Solar Orbiter’s magnetometer was important to the staff’s observations, because it takes measurements of native magnetic fields, enabling the staff to see how the magnetic subject of the comet’s tail interacted with the magnetic subject carried via the photo voltaic system by the photo voltaic wind.

The mannequin the staff developed from all this knowledge indicated that the interplanetary magnetic subject bends across the comet, and the central tail of the comet has a weaker magnetic subject than what surrounds it. You can consider the comet as a biker on a windy day—the photo voltaic wind bends across the comet. According to a Royal Astronomical Society press release, the mixture of the magnetic subject draping and the ions produced by the comet’s melting nucleus produces the comet’s ion tail.

“This is quite a unique event, and an exciting opportunity for us to study the makeup and structure of comet tails in unprecedented detail,” mentioned Lorenzo Matteini, a photo voltaic physicist at Imperial College London and chief of the current work, in the identical launch. “Hopefully with the Parker Solar Probe and Solar Orbiter now orbiting the Sun closer than ever before, these events may become much more common in future!”

Amateur astronomers actually missed out on what would have been a spectacular view final yr. But their loss was physicists’ achieve, as they’ve been in a position to higher perceive these unusual phenomena.

More: Hubble Captures Incredible Images of Highly Anticipated Comet Breaking Up