2026 April 09 - Destruction of Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS)

0:00Greetings and welcome to the astronomy picture of the day podcast today's picture is titled destruction of comet sea 2026 a1 maps so what do we see here well here we see a video clip and it will run about eight seconds so it's real quick I'm gonna put it on repeat in a minute here and we'll take a look at it but what it is going to show is the comet will coming very close to the sun and then getting destroyed now the images that we see here are put together from multiple images and multiple observatories and in fact the video took 40 hours worth of data put together so it's not a real-time video it is very much a time lapse looking at many hours worth of material now the different images here put together the blue looks at the wider angle corona graph and the red at the narrower angle corona graph both looking from the solar and

1:04heliosphere observatory looking at the sun now that gives us a wider field view and then a more narrow field view that we can see the sun itself is masked out by a corona graph blocking out the sun allowing us to actually see the corona and then as you can see there's an image of the sun that was edited back in just for show there so let's go ahead and play the video and as I said it will repeat over and over again but what we're seeing starting to the lower left is the comet coming in heading toward around the sun and then you'll see a few seconds later it comes around the other side but it's been distorted it is coming apart and it actually is just a big cloud of debris that has been vaporized so comets will do this they some some of them will come in very close to the sun like this this one coming at a distance about half the distance between earth and moon so it's really close to the sun that's just too much for a comet which is an icy body mostly icy materials water ice and

2:09other ice as well as some little bits of debris some dust that is mixed in with it as well well that coming too close to the sun with its strong gravitational field and its heat will end up destroying a lot of comets now that doesn't happen to every comet some comets don't come in so close to the sun and they can survive many trips around our sun Halley's comet is one of those that is well known that returns every 76 years other comets come in only once and may get too close to the sun such as this one and end up being destroyed and other comets actually exist much further away but do not ever come close to the sun so we never actually see them with the distinct pattern of a comet that we're used to seeing and that would mean seeing the head and the tail of a comet as we see in our picture today as the object comes in and then comes out the other side as just a cloud of debris having passed too close to our sun

3:12and being destroyed so that was our picture of the day titled Destruction of Comet C2026A1 maps we'll be back again tomorrow for the next picture previewed to be Galactic and Tenney so we'll see what that is about tomorrow and until then have a great day everyone and I will see you in class