Solar and Heliospheric Observatory
SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) is a joint ESA and NASA solar space observatory that, after its 1995 launch, observed the Sun for nearly three decades and discovered more than 5,000 comets. People sometimes believe they spot “UFOs” in its public images, but these are image artifacts and data dropouts.
The SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) is a joint solar space probe of the European Space Agency (ESA) and NASA. It was launched from Cape Canaveral on December 2, 1995, and orbits the first Lagrange point (L1) of the Sun–Earth system, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, from where it can observe the Sun without interruption. The mission was originally planned for two years, but it was extended several times, so SOHO became one of the most important data sources in solar physics for nearly three decades. In 1998, contact with it was lost for months due to a control error, but engineers managed to save it.
Scientific role
The satellite studies the Sun's interior, its atmosphere (the corona), the solar wind and solar eruptions. Its coronagraph called LASCO is especially well known; by blocking out the Sun's disk, it makes the faint corona and coronal mass ejections visible. SOHO's data are also important in space weather forecasting, because they can give warnings days in advance of solar storms reaching Earth.
SOHO is also the most successful comet hunter in history: its 5,000th comet was discovered on March 25, 2024. Most of the discoveries are among the so-called sungrazing comets that pass close to the Sun, and the majority of them were found by volunteers of the NASA-supported Sungrazer Project by examining the publicly available images. The 5,000th comet was discovered by Hanjie Tan, a doctoral student in Prague.
Connection to the UFO topic
Because NASA and ESA publish SOHO's images publicly in near real time, “anomalies” from them regularly circulate in the UFO community: unusually shaped objects visible near the Sun, which some amateur researchers believe to be alien spacecraft. In April 2012, many people saw in one image a spacecraft equipped with a docking arm, and Scott Waring, a well-known UFO hunter, claimed several times between 2011 and 2020 that a giant black cube, larger even than Earth, was visible next to the Sun.
Official and skeptical position
According to NASA, ESA and skeptical researchers, such phenomena can be traced back to well-known causes. According to a specialist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), the 2012 “spacecraft” was a series of streaks caused by cosmic radiation: the traces of charged particles striking the camera's sensor, which were no longer visible in the following images. According to NASA astrophysicist C. Alex Young, the “black cubes” are simple data dropouts: SOHO's images are assembled from smaller pieces, and where a piece is lost, a black square remains. Other sources of similar misunderstandings are comets, overexposed images of planets and bright stars entering the coronagraph's field of view, and image-processing artifacts.
Sources
- ESA: SOHO fact sheet
- The Register: SOHO marks 29 years in space (2024. december 3.)
- Space.com: Solar spacecraft SOHO discovers its 5,000th comet
- Live Science: UFO Spaceship Orbiting the Sun, or a Camera Glitch? (2012)
- Lead Stories: NASA Did NOT Capture 'Alien Cube Ship' On Photo Shared By UFO Hunter (2020. július 30.)