Comet Hyakutake enters the hostile
neighborhood of the sun in this picture taken by scientists at
the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). NRL's Large Angle Spectrometric
Coronagraph (LASCO) instrument took this image on May 1. LASCO
which is orbiting one million miles away between the sun and
the Earth, is being carried onboard the European Space Agency
(ESA)/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO).
The sun displays one of its large
ejections of hot, ionized gases in the left part of the picture.
These solar mass ejections are part of the solar wind. After
travelling for 3 to 4 days, they can hit the Earth and cause
disturbances in the magnetosphere, resulting in brilliant auroras.
Hot ionized gases are trapped in the equatorial plane of the
sun. They have been blown out by this explosion and show up as
empty black streaks. The bright ring ring in the center of the
picture marks the diameter of the visible sun. (The bright point-like
features in this picture are hits by high energetic cosmic ray
particles on the detector of the camera. There is no protection
from them at the location of the orbit of SOHO.)
Scientists at NRL are looking
forward to Hyakutake's passage through the equatorial plane of
the sun, where the solar wind interacts with the comet's tail.
(Scientists in the U.S., Germany, France and the United Kingdom
are involved in the LASCO project.)
The U.S. Naval Research Laboratory is the Navy's full-spectrum corporate laboratory, conducting a broadly based multidisciplinary program of scientific research and advanced technological development. The Laboratory, with a total complement of nearly 2,500 personnel, is located in southwest Washington, D.C., with other major sites at the Stennis Space Center, Miss., and Monterey, Calif. NRL has served the Navy and the nation for over 85 years and continues to meet the complex technological challenges of today's world. For more information, visit the NRL homepage or join the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.
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