The 'devil comet' had its tail ripped off by a solar storm

A sudden coronal mass ejection recently hit comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, causing the "devil comet" to briefly lose its tail.

The exploding "devil comet" was blasted by a massive plasma wave from the Sun , temporarily blowing away its dusty tail. A NASA spacecraft captured the epic encounter in a new video, which also features an appearance by a distant Jupiter.

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks (far left) was recently bombarded by a sudden coronal mass ejection. Jupiter was also seen in a new video of the event. (Photo: NASA/STEREO-A)

Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks (12P) is a green cryovolcanic comet with a nucleus 17km in diameter. It occasionally erupts, shooting a mixture of icy gas and dust into the solar system whenever it absorbs too much of the Sun's radiation. When this happens, its chaos zone – the cloud of particles surrounding the nucleus – expands and becomes much brighter. In the past, this bright cloud was deformed from the inside, giving the comet a 'pair of horns' that gave it the 'devil' nickname. However, these horns have disappeared in recent outbreaks.

12P orbits the Sun approximately every 71 years in an elliptical or elongated orbit. Comet spends most of its life in the outer reaches of our cosmic neighborhood, beyond the view of telescopes. However, it is now making its final plunge towards the Sun and will reach its closest point to Earth, called perihelion, on April 22. It will then shoot around our host star and recede toward the edge of the Solar System - if it isn't first burned up by this close encounter.

War in heaven

On April 12, the comet was hit by a giant plasma cloud called a coronal mass ejection (CME) that exploded from the Sun without warning. This caused a blackout, in which the comet's dusty tail was temporarily blown away by a solar storm before reemerging later.

Disconnection events are rare but become more likely the closer the comet gets to the Sun. The same thing happened to comet Nishimura in September 2023, when a CME blew off the comet's tail as it orbited the Sun - just as 12P will do this week. And in January 2023, an astrophotographer captured time-lapse footage of the same thing happening to blue comet C/2022 E3.

This is not the first time 12P has been discovered near another celestial body on its journey through the solar system. The exploding comet was also photographed flying past the Crimson Crescent Nebula in January and was live-streamed as it zoomed past the Andromeda galaxy in March.

There is also hope that 12P may appear during the recent total solar eclipse. However, it proved extremely difficult to detect because the moon temporarily obscured the Sun.