Watch: NASA Satellite Captures Comet Colliding With The Sun

NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was able to capture the moment when a comet collided with the Sun.

In a new video provided by NASA’s SOHO satellite, the Sun can be seen in the center and is blocked by an opaque disk in order to reduce its glare. Located at the top of the Sun is Venus while Mars can be spotted from its left side, Space.com reported.

Although the video shows numerous comets whizzing past the Sun, one stood out as it proceeded on a collision course with the giant star. According to SOHO, the comet is a Kreutz sungrazer. This is a family of comets that orbit very close to the Sun. They are the fragments of a comet named after the German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz.

As the comet on through its path, it eventually crashes on the Sun’s surface. Unfortunately, due to the opaque disk covering the Sun, the explosion of the comet as it gets destroyed by the giant star cannot be seen in the video.

The Kreutz sungrazer marks the latest impact event captured in space. Earlier this month, an astronomer from Texas was able to record the moment when a meteor exploded in Jupiter’s atmosphere. The explosion was so big that it was spotted from Earth.

According to astronomer Ethan Chappel, he was able to capture the rare moment as he was taking photos and videos of Jupiter using his specialized camera.

After reviewing Chappel’s video, astronomers commended him for being able to capture a rare cosmic event. Although meteors, asteroids and comets crashing on planets and massive stars are very common, being able to record such an event from Earth is very remarkable.

“It’s a very fleeting event, it’s a few seconds,” Honti Horner of the University of Southern Queensland told Science Alert. “It wouldn’t be so obvious, if you were looking through the eyepiece of the telescope.”

“A lot of times these things will go unnoticed and unobserved,” he continued. “Half of them will happen on the far side of the planet. So there’s a lot of things working against seeing these events.”