The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has become the most important form of kites of all time after identifying your kite number 2000. The aircraft of ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States) reached this milestone on December 26, fifteen years after its launch, thanks to the collaboration of science enthusiasts worldwide. This amount is even more impressive when you consider that SOHO was designed to observe the Sun and not for finding comets.
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has become the most important form of kites of all time after identifying your kite number 2000. The aircraft of the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration of the United States) reached this milestone on December 26, fifteen years after its launch, thanks to the collaboration of amateur science worldwide. This amount is even more impressive when taking into account SOHO was designed to observe the Sun and not for finding comets.
"Since its launch on December 2, 1995 to observe the Sun, SOHO has more than doubled the number of comets whose orbit has been determined in the last 300 years," said Joe Gurman, project scientist for SOHO Center Goddard Space Flight Center of NASA in Greenbelt, Maryland (USA).
The project team recognized that although SOHO is the one to take the honors, in fact the work is done by dozens of amateur astronomers voluntarily scrutinizing the dim lights that populate the images generated by LASCO cameras ("Wide Angle Spectrometric Coronagraph) on SOHO. According to scientists, more than 70 people from 18 countries for 15 years have helped to detect comets through the study of the SOHO images posted on the Internet.
Karl Battams, responsible since 2003 for the operation of the website's search SOHO Naval Research Laboratory in Washington (U.S.), reports of people receiving any of the points of the camera images SOHO LASCO have the size and brightness needed to be directed to the Sun comets then confirm each finding, each kite gives an informal number and sends the information to the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts (USA), charged with classifying astronomical objects of small size and corresponding orbits. SOHO
10 years used to detect the first 1,000 comets, but only 5 in the 1,000 following. The project team explained that this increase in the rate of discovery has been due in part to greater participation of seekers of comets and the optimization of the images used for your research, but also a systematic increase and not yet clarified the number of comets that orbit the Sun In fact, in December detected 37 new comets, an unprecedented amount and enough to qualify the situation as "storm of comets," according to scientists.
In the initial design of LASCO had not seen the comet detection. It was equipped with a camera that hides the brightest part of the Sun to better observe emissions in its weak star's outer atmosphere or corona. The ability to detect these objects is an indirect consequence, for blocking the sun is much easier to see fainter objects such as comets.
"The discovery of comet carries significant consequences for science," he said. "First, we now know that there are many more comets in the inner Solar System than thought, which can tell us much about their origin, generation and decay, 'explained Dr. Battams, adding that" we can say Many of these kites share a common origin. "
In fact, according to the astronomer, it is considered that 85% of the comets discovered by LASCO come from a group called the Kreutz family, the remnant of a large comet that had broken several hundred years ago.
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