tone
music
Hi, I am Karl Battams. I am
a computational scientist and astrophysicist from the Naval Research
Lab. Everything you are seeing in this movie
is based on actual data, so actually, every single
dot that you see in this movie is a real comet that has been
discovered or observed by SOHO. SOHO is
the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, so it's a joint
mission between NASA and the European Space Agency.
SOHO's mission was to study and understand the
sun and the region of space surrounding the sun and all of
cool, awesome, explosive stuff that the sun does. There
was never any intention for SOHO to be
a comet discoverer
The reason SOHO has been so successful at finding these comets is because it has got this
wonderful instrument on the spacecraft that offers us a view
of the inner solar system that we just cannot get from
any telescope on Earth. The different colors in this movie represent
different families or populations of comets
that SOHO is observing. The red comets, these
are Kreutz sungrazer. The green comets are
Maya group comets. The only exception is the yellow one
that you see. These are what we call non-group comets. These do not
belong to any family. You see as these objects
are flying in toward the sun, they are not really going in a straight line, they are following a curve.
That curve is because of the sun's gravity.
The closer a comet gets to the sun, the faster
it goes, and then they slow down again as they move away from the sun.
One of the really awesome facts that I love
about the sungrazers, in particular the Kreutz comets that you are seeing in red,
they are the fastest object
in our solar system that aren't particles.
They get so close to the sun, that they
are traveling at over 600 km/sec, that's not
.2% of the speed of light.
It is just an inconceiveable velocity for
pretty much anything that's not particle, but for a big
house-sized chunk of rock and ice, it is truly insane that these objects are going
that fast. Unfortunately, they are getting completely fried in the process,
but it is really awesome that they are doing that.
The comets that are flying around the sun and disappearing out of the movie
again, they have survived past the sun. They are not getting completely
vaporized by the intense solar radiation.
Any comet that you see in this movie that does not have a label
it means it was discovered by SOHO. I really love
this mission that was designed to do something
completely different, just by luck and by chance,
it's completely rewritten the history books. More than
well over half of the comets we have on official record
now carry SOHO's name, and it was never even intended
to do that. I just love that fact.
beeping