![]() ![]() The comet was very bright, a sign that it might also be quite large. But they burn off a large part of their masses in the process, sometimes leaving a dazzling trail of extreme ultraviolet emissions in their wake.Ĭomet ISON, first spotted more than a year before it reached the Sun, was thought to be large enough to survive the trip. Larger comets, like Comet Lovejoy, which sailed through the Sun's corona in December 2011, can survive brushes with the Sun. Sun-grazing comets are not that unusual, but they're usually too small to live through the encounter. How they behave on their journey past the Sun can offer insight into the corona's composition and the behavior of the Sun's magnetic field. Solar scientists, like Bryans, are interested in comets like ISON because they can act as probes into the mysterious solar corona. "We think that the most likely thing that happened is that Comet ISON broke up before it got really close to the Sun," said Bryans, a researcher at NCAR's High Altitude Observatory. Bryans and colleague Dean Pesnell, of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, recently published a study that sheds light on the mystery of Comet ISON. But that's not necessarily a boring result. "We did image processing just to make sure nothing was there, and it wasn't. "The first thing we did was make sure that we had definitely seen nothing," said Paul Bryans, a solar scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), who was looking for the comet using NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. Scientists were expecting quite a show.īut instead of a brilliant cosmic display, there was … nothing. Comet ISON, a bright ball of frozen matter from the earliest days of the universe, was inbound from the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system and expected to pierce the Sun's corona on Nov. ![]()
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