A zoomed-in view of the disintegrated comet ATLAS
© The Virtual Telescope Project 2.0/Gianluca MasiA zoomed-in view of the disintegrated comet.
There's no longer any doubt. Comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4) is falling apart. Around the world, amateur astronomers are beginning to witness the breakup, even imaging individual fragments. Jose de Queiroz photographed 3 pieces on April 11th:

Comet ATLAS fragmenting

"I took the picture using the 90 cm telescope at Observatory Mirasteilas in Falera, Switzerland," says de Queiroz. "This is a stacked 20x120 sec exposure."

Confirming images from the Lulin One-meter Telescope in Taiwan have just been reported in an Astronomer's Telegram. The observing team, led by Zhong-Yi Lin of Taiwan's National Central University, estimates that the leading fragment is about 3400 km ahead of the trailing pair.


Comment: Fragmentation is the logical way for individual comets to cope with high electric stress, causing any given comet to go through a process of fission (i.e. splitting into two or more parts).

When a sphere is divided into two equally-sized spheres, the total mass will remain the same (no matter disappears) but the total surface area of this pair will be about 26% larger than the area of the original single sphere.

This increases the total surface area exposed to the electric field and thus decreases the current density (amperes per square meter).

Thus, electrically-induced fission enables comets to reduce the electric stress they are subjected to by spreading it between two or more bodies (hence the reported decrease in brightness)

Adapted from chapter 15 of Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection


The breakup of Comet ATLAS coincides with a sharp decline in its brightness. The Comet Observation Database shows a drop of two full magnitudes (a factor of more than 6):

Comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4)
These trends suggest that the comet *might* completely desolve before its close approach to the sun inside the orbit of Mercury at the end of May. "Follow-up observations of C/2019 Y4 (ATLAS), both imaging and spectroscopy, are highly recommended to investigate the cause of this cometary breakup event," says Lin and colleagues.