Sungrazing comets as solar probes
Thursday, December 6, 2012 - 11:20
in Astronomy & Space
To observe how winds move high in Earth's atmosphere, scientists sometimes release clouds of barium as tracers to track how the material corkscrews, blows around, and changes composition in response to high altitude winds -- but scientists have no similar technique to study the turbulent atmosphere of the sun. So researchers were excited in December 2011, when Comet Lovejoy swept right through the sun's corona with its long tail streaming behind it.