25 July
2003: On 25 July 2003, astronomers using ESA’s X-ray observatory, XMM-Newton, announced that they had discovered a pair of X-ray tails, stretching 3 million million kilometres across the sky. They ...
27 FEB. 2004
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2000: On 26 July 2000, Comet Linear C/1999 S4 began to break up on its closest approach to the Sun.
On 28 July, Spain’s Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias reported that an ordinary-looking comet was breaking up and some of the world’s top telescopes watched its subsequent disintegration till nothing was left. The SWAN instrument on ESA's SOHO spacecraft had already been observing Comet Linear by ultraviolet light for two months, and continued to watch it till the remnants faded from view in mid-August.
The fragmentation seen by SWAN began on 21 July, almost a week before observers on the ground noticed it. Between 25 May and 12 August, the dying comet released altogether 3.3 million tonnes of water vapour into space, as its ice evaporated in the warmth of the Sun.
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24 July
1853: On 24 July 1853, Henri-Alexandre Deslandres was born.Deslandres was a French astrophysicist who invented a spectroheliograph to photograph the Sun in monochromatic light and made extensive studies of the ...
23 July
On 23 July every year, the Perseid meteor shower begins.The shower begins when Earth enters the edge of a cloud of debris from Comet Swift-Tuttle. Dust-sized particles hit the atmosphere ...
22 July
1994: On 22 July 1994, the last of the large fragments of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy (fragment W) hit Jupiter.Starting on 16 July 1994, Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy's impact with Jupiter was the first ...
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