The Headless Halloween Comet Has Been Murdered by the Sun

While many backyard astronomers were waking up early to catch a glimpse of Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS and its stunning anti-tail, another comet was making its way through our solar system. C/2024 C1 Atlas -- adorably referred to as the Halloween Comet -- was briefly visible to astronomers and folks with a telescope during the middle of the month on its way to circle the sun and shoot back into space. Unfortunately, the comet did not survive its brush with the sun. 

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The Halloween Comet's untimely demise was captured by NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which spends all of its time looking at the sun. You can watch the final moments of C1 Atlas, as NASA provided two GIFs for the public's viewing pleasure. The first shows the comet entering from the bottom right corner as it approaches perihelion -- the part of its orbit where it's closest to the sun -- before suddenly disappearing. 

This NASA GIF shows the comet entering from the bottom right corner as it approaches perihelion -- the part of its orbit where it's closest to the sun -- before suddenly disappearing. 

NASA's second GIF finishes the story. The comet is seen flying in close before fizzling out and disappearing entirely. In a coincidence of cosmic proportions, the sun responds to its fresh kill by letting out a couple of coronal mass ejections. Astronomers say that there's no way the comet caused the CMEs. It's just a coincidence caused by the active sun since it's at its solar maximum.

This NASA GIF shows the comet flying in close before fizzling out and disappearing entirely.

No October surprise here

The destruction of the Halloween comet is not an unexpected result. It's a part of the Kreutz family of sungrazing comets. The reason they are called sungrazing comets is because they get very close to the sun, which results in most of them vaporizing before they can complete their orbit and return to outer space. The Kreutz family specifically all follow a similar orbit since they all came from a much larger comet that broke up long ago.

Only a handful of Kreutz sungrazers have made it through the fiery gauntlet of their perihelion. The most recent one was Comet C/2011 W3 Lovejoy in 2011. NASA's SOHO also watched this one happen, and so you can you. The comet, which is much brighter in SOHO's view than the Halloween comet was, can be seen flying in, whipping around the sun and flying back out into space. Other sungrazers, like the intensely studied Comet ISON, were not so lucky. 

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Did the sun vaporize the comet?

Well, yes and no. Karl Battams, director of computational science at the United States Naval Research Laboratory, noted on X that the comet "was clearly already a pile of rubble by the time it reached the LASCO field of view." (LASCO refers to the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment instrument, a set of three coronagraph telescopes launched in 1995 on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory satellite.)

In short, that means that by the time the comet shows up in the footage above, it was already breaking apart. This is backed up by infrared imagery taken of the comet and posted on Astronomers Telegram showing that it was beginning to break apart earlier in October. 

So, much of the damage was done before it got close to the sun, giving our nearest star a partial pass on being the full cause of the Halloween comet's demise. However, the sun's intense heat and radiation went ahead and wiped the comet from the face of the universe, so yes, it was eventually vaporized by the sun.