Stunning Comet Spiral Offers Glimpse of Icy Snowball at Its Core
Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is hiding a strange spiral in its icy heart—and it may tell scientists about the comet’s innards
An image of Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks and its rotating core taken by Jan Erik Vallestad.
Jan Erik Vallestad
Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is a shapeshifter: in the summer of 2023 it sported wings like the Millennium Falcon, the iconic Star Wars ship. By autumn it had been dubbed the “Devil comet” for its horned appearance.
Now, for astrophotographers with the right equipment, Comet 12P appears to hide a perfect spiral—and the stunning sight could tell scientists more about this particular ice ball, which is one of the brightest comets on record. Still, it can be tricky to observe and photograph. Comet 12P is trekking toward its closest approach to the sun, set to occur in late April, so currently, it never rises high above the horizon and competes with the dregs of sunlight.
“I didn’t have any high expectations at all because when I started the sessions each day, you could still see the sunlight on the horizon,” says Jan Erik Vallestad, an amateur astrophotographer based in Norway. “I thought I would probably get just the coma—a blob.” (A coma is the fuzzy-looking cloud surrounding the icy nucleus, or core, of a comet and is created by gas and dust lifted off its surface.)
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But Vallestad got much more than a blob: in an image taken on March 9, he captured not only the comet’s long wispy tail streaking across the sky but also a spiral feature that he was able to highlight in editing.
As bizarre as the phenomenon looks, it’s real, says Quanzhi Ye, a planetary astronomer at the…
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