NEARLY 90 per cent of the 104 comets that the SOHO spacecraft has discovered
close to the Sun in the past four years are small fragments of a single giant
comet.
Astronomers believe they are descendants of a giant comet that broke up,
possibly the one observed by the Greek historian Ephorus in 372 BC. The
fragments break up every time their 800-year orbit takes them past the Sun, says
Doug Biesecker, a SOHO scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in
Greenbelt, Maryland.
Biesecker believes the fragments broke into icy chunks measuring less than 50
metres in diameter…
