... The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) was launched December 2, 1995, and has ... On June 2, 1998, it spotted not one but two comets very near the solar surface. ...
... He calls the technique "solar obliteration" because it just barely blocks the view of the Sun's disk, letting the camera peer into the sky very close to the Sun without being completely washed out by the brightness of the actual solar disk. ...
... TRACE looks at the region of the Sun between the "surface" that we see, called the photosphere , and the corona, the wispy ethereal atmosphere of the Sun seen in every solar eclipse picture. ...
... know of at least two planets orbiting binary stars: the planets around the binaries 16 Cygni B and Rho Corona Borealis ... as ten years ago, we knew of no other planets outside our solar system, and all we could do was speculate on how many there ...