Soul of Systems

Comet Lovejoy of 2011

 

In November 2011, Australian observer Terry Lovejoy discovered a faint +13th magnitude object. Comet C/2011 W3 Lovejoy was a Kreutz sun grazer, one of a handful seen each year. It surprised astronomers, however, when it survived its fiery plunge just 87,000 miles above the Sun’s surface (about a third the distance between the Earth and Moon) to become a fine morning object for southern hemisphere observers, similar to Ikeya-Seki in the 1960s. Comet Lovejoy was visible in the daytime, and astronauts even photographed it from the International Space Station. (A quick primer: the brightness of an astronomical object is described as its magnitude. The lower the number, the brighter the object, and one step in magnitude is equal to 2.512 times in brightness.)