DISINTEGRATING COMET: Watching the movie of yesterday's CME (see below), Spaceweather.com reader Marian Urbaník noticed something we had missed: An extremely faint comet plunging into the sun. It is marked by black arrows in this animation. The icy dive-bomber passed the 5th magnitude star psi Virginis around 09:30 UT on Oct. 14th then vanished ~10 hours later, apparently vaporized by solar heating. R.I.P. comet!
SOLAR EXPLOSION MISSES EARTH: Yesterday, Oct. 14th, something exploded on the sun. Coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) saw a cloud of debris (a CME) billowing over the edge of the solar disk. Click to set the scene in motion:
This CME will not hit Earth. It was launched from the farside of the sun, and the debris is therefore heading away from our planet. Sorry, auroraphiles!
What exploded? Probably not a sunspot. Sunspots are rare now because of an ongoing deep Solar Minimum. More likely, the source was an unstable filament of magnetism that whip-lashed in the sun's atmosphere, hurling surrounding gas into space. We can't say for sure, however, because the blast site was hidden behind the edge of the sun.
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MEMORIAL SPACE PENDANT: Consider it a space capsule for a loved one. On Oct. 6, 2019, the students of Earth to Sky Calculus launched this unique memorial urn pendant to the stratosphere onboard one of their cosmic ray balloons. The sparkling blue heart flew 108,893 feet above Earth's surface:
You can have it for $129.95. The students are selling memorial urn pendants to support their cosmic ray ballooning program. Buy one and we'll fly it again for free with ashes you provide inside the pendant's screw-topped chamber. It's an affordable way to send remains to the edge of space. The pendant and its contents will be returned to you at the end of the flight.
Each pendant comes with a greeting card showing the item in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space and back again.
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