A huge ‘alien’ comet hurtled toward the sun — see what happened nextBy Brooke Kato
February 2, 2023
It was star-grazing.
A giant “alien” comet had a recent near-miss with our solar system’s most notorious star: the sun.
Experts believe the comet – known formally as 96P/Machholz 1 – came from somewhere else beyond our solar system. The intergalactic “ice ball,” which measured 3.7 miles wide, was plummeting toward the sun earlier this week, and its close encounter was caught on camera by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory.
Typical comets are dissolved when approaching the sun so close, but the grandeur of 96P – more than two-thirds the height of Mount Everest, according to LiveScience – kept it from completely dissipating.
“96P is one of the most compositionally and behaviorally weird comets in the solar system,” Karl Battams, the director of the US Naval Research Laboratory’s Sungrazer Project in Washington, DC, said in a tweet last month.
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Source:
https://nypost.com/2023/02/02/a-huge-alien-comet-hurtled-toward-the-sun-see-what-happened-next/