At first glance it looks like aliens are using the sun for target practice.

A string of bullet-shaped streaks of light appear to be shooting straight toward the sun.

These are the proverbial snowballs in Hell, plunging 300 miles per second toward a fiery end in the sun’s atmosphere.

The NASA/ESA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) observed the demise of one comet fragment on Friday, March 12.

The wayward comets are called sungrazers. They are a class of comet that likes to live dangerously. Sungrazers can skirt within a few thousand miles of the sun’s roiling photosphere. Many are torn apart or evaporate as they streak along at a blazing 1 million miles per hour. As their orbits are perturbed, surviving sungrazers can collide with the sun on a subsequent passage.

The first recognized sungrazing comet was detected during a total solar eclipse in May 1882. Just imagine the surprise and awe as a glowing streak of light appeared to observers as the sun entered totality. Other sungrazers have been briefly bright enough to be seen in the daytime sky alongside the sun. The most recent, comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965.

Once solar observing satellites were lofted into orbit the sungrazers were easily detected. SOHO, with its coronographs, has cataloged over 1,000 sungrazers in spectacular passages.

But we missed the real fireworks by 4 billion years. The period of late heavy bombardment in the newborn solar system should have seen the sky around the sun ablaze with sungrazers.

Evidence comes from observations of the young Beta Pictoris system that is believed to have recently formed planets. Since the early 1990s astronomers have monitored transient events in the star’s visible spectrum that are interpreted as resulting from evaporating comets skirting Beta Pictoris.

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Indian defence scientists are readying a weapon system to neutralise enemy satellites operating in low-earth orbit, a top defence scientist said in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday.

“India is putting together building blocks of technology that could be used to neutralise enemy satellites,” Defence Research and Development Organisation Director General V K Saraswat told reporters on the sidelines of the 97th Indian Science Congress.

However, he added that the defence scientists have not planned any tests but have started planning such technology which could be used to leapfrog to build a weapon in case the country needed it.

Saraswat, who is also the Scientific Adviser to Defence Minister, said the scientists were planning to build the weapon which would have the capacity to hit and destroy satellites in low-earth orbit and polar orbit.

Usually, satellites in such orbits are used for network centric warfare and neutralising such spacecraft would deny enemy access to its space assets.

“We are working to ensure space security and protect our satellites. At the same time we are also working on how to deny the enemy access to its space assets,” he said.

To achieve such capabilities, a kill vehicle needs to be developed and that process is being carried out under the Ballistic Missile Defence programme.

“Basically, these are deterrence technologies and quite certainly many of these technologies will not be used. I hope they are not used,” Saraswat said.

In January 2007, China had demonstrated its capability to destroy satellites by conducting an anti-satellite test. It had launched a missile that blew to smithereens an ageing weather satellite Fengyun 1C orbiting at a distance of 500 miles away from the earth.

Saraswat said the DRDO is building an advanced version of its interceptor missile with a range of 120-140 km. The missile interceptor is expected to be test fired in September. Space security is going to be a major issue in the future and India should not be left behind in this area, the defence scientist said.

Are you ready for the End of the World? Master of the Apocalyptic Blockbuster Roland Emmerich unveils his latest doomsday disaster on Friday November 13: 2012, starring John Cusack as sci-fi writer Jackson Curtis, a divorced father who occasionally moonlights as a limousine driver. First come the mass suicides in Guatemala in anticipation of the end of the world. Then vast cracks are found in California fault lines; Curtis saves his ex-wife, child and her new boyfriend in the nick of time as Los Angeles crumbles into the sea. Rio, Washington DC, and the Vatican in Rome are all destroyed in short order. Oh, did I mention the sooper sekrit society that is constructing giant arks in the Himalayas to save a small fraction of humanity from impending doom? It’s all delivered in Emmerich’s trademark cataclysmic style (what io9 has dubbed “disaster porn”). Check it out:

The film’s premise derives from a popular doomsday prediction centered on the Mayan calendar. It lasts 5126, at which point the calendar abruptly stops at December 21, 2012. For whatever reason, the Mayans didn’t bother to count any further, leading certain highly imaginative, rather hysterical types to conclude this denotes the End of the World.

2012 conspiracy theorists have also bundled in the notion that this global destruction will occur when the legendary Planet X crashes into Earth. Astronomers were intrigued by the possibility in the mid-19th century, shortly after the discovery of Neptune — they thought it might explain perceived discrepancies in the orbits of the great gas giants. Pluto, discovered in 1930, was initially heralded as Planet X, but it turned out to be too small to effect the orbits of the gas giants. Heck, it’s not even technically a planet any more. (There is a dwarf planet called Eris just beyond Pluto, but it’s in a stable orbit and isn’t going to crash into Earth.)

And because you can never cram too many crazy ideas into a single Disaster Hoax, there are some people who believe Planet X is actually the mythical Nibiru, supposedly known to ancient Sumerians, which has a highly elliptical orbit and passes into our solar system every 3600 years. Earth itself, according to this crackpot theory, was created from a collision between Nibiru and some other object in the asteroid belt. Oh, Nibiru also doubles as a “spaceship” of sorts, in that an alien race supposedly traveled to Earth during one of its passes and founded the human race.

There isn’t a shred of evidence for any of this, of course, and any number of articles and blog posts have been written debunking the nonsense — along with Neil de Grasse Tyson, who does so with typical good humor in the clip below. That doesn’t mean we won’t thrill to the sight of a cinematic end of the world, because who doesn’t love a good disaster flick now and then? But we should really focus our doomsday anxieties to more realistic scenarios.