NASA Just Captured Stunning Images of a Comet’s Fiery Tail

Comet in Space Art Concept — Comet ATLAS thrilled skywatchers as it skimmed the Sun, leaving behind striking images and scientific clues before fading—or disintegrating—into the night. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) blazed past the Sun, captured in stunning detail by the SOHO spacecraft. Scientists used its passage to study how solar winds affect comets, revealing key insights about space weather. Now fading from view, it may have broken apart.

Between January 11 and 15, 2025, a bright comet streaked across images taken by the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) spacecraft. Known as C/2024 G3 (ATLAS), the comet reached its closest point to the Sun, called perihelion, on January 13. At that moment, it came within just 8 million miles of the Sun — about 9% of the average Earth-Sun distance.

Capturing a Cosmic Spectacle

SOHO’s LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph) instrument captured these striking views of Comet ATLAS. LASCO uses a special disk to block the Sun’s intense light, allowing scientists to observe the fainter structures in the Sun’s outer atmosphere, known as the corona. Although Comet ATLAS was first discovered in April 2024 by the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey, LASCO has contributed to the discovery of more than 5,000 comets as they pass near the Sun.

In mid-January 2025, the ESA (European Space Agency) and NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) watched comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) pass about 8 million miles from the Sun. In this image sequence, captured by SOHO’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO), the Sun is blocked by a disk (at the bottom), and the white circle shows the size and location of the Sun. The head of the comet became so bright, it overwhelmed LASCO’s sensor, creating artificial horizontal bands (known as “bleeding”) in the images. Credit: NASA/ESA/SOHO/LASCO/K. Battams

Unraveling the Secrets of Solar Wind

Karl Battams, LASCO’s principal investigator at the U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C., processed some of the images to bring out fine details in the comet’s tail and create the sequence above. When bright comets like this one pass close to the Sun, their tails often react to fluctuations in the solar wind, a stream of particles and energy constantly flowing off the Sun. Heliophysicists can study the reaction of the tails to better understand the Sun’s effects on its neighborhood and on comets passing by.

Fading Into the Southern Skies

While it was briefly visible in Northern Hemisphere skies just after sunset near perihelion, comet ATLAS is now slowly receding from the Sun and is best seen from the Southern Hemisphere, where the comet is moving into darker night skies. However, there are signs the comet might have broken up after its pass by the Sun, meaning it could fade rapidly over the coming days.

The SOHO mission is a cooperative effort between ESA and NASA. Mission control is based at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. LASCO was built by an international consortium led by the U.S. Naval Research Lab.