The comet C/2024 S1 (ATLAS), also known as the “Halloween comet,” met its demise on Monday as it approached the sun. The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), a spacecraft operated by NASA and the European Space Agency, captured the comet’s final moments. Astronomers discovered the comet on September 27 using the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System in Hawaii.
The comet earned its nickname due to speculation that it might be visible in the night sky around Halloween. As the comet neared its closest point to the sun, called the perihelion, it broke apart into chunks before ultimately evaporating. C/2024 S1 was a sungrazer, passing within about 1.5 million kilometers of the sun’s surface.
Karl Battams, a computational scientist at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and the principal investigator for SOHO’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph instrument suite, explained that the comet reached its perihelion on Monday at 7:30 a.m. ET. It was completely vaporized after passing within 1% of Earth’s distance from the sun.
‘Halloween comet’ nears sun’s peril
“Statistically, it’s extremely rare for sungrazing comets to survive (as they fly) past the sun,” Battams said. NASA’s citizen science project, which Battams leads, has discovered more than 4,000 sungrazing comets, none of which have survived their perihelion. The Halloween comet was part of a population of mostly tiny comet fragments originating from a single parent object that broke apart near the sun thousands of years ago.
Despite being observed earlier in the month, the comet was never visible to the naked eye. William Cooke, lead of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office, mentioned that between now and 2030, only three known comets are expected to reach naked eye visibility: C/2024 E1, C/2024 G3, and 22P/Kopff. However, there is always a chance that a new, bright comet could be discovered.
While the Halloween comet’s debris will not produce a meteor shower, the Southern Taurids, originating from Comet Encke, are expected to peak on the night of November 4 into the early morning of November 5. Battams noted that comets have always been a source of fascination due to their infrequent occurrences. “I’m sure back in pre-industrial times when light pollution was no concern, some of the comets that people saw must have been equally awe-inspiring and terrifying,” he added.
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