Comet ISON May Have Disintegrated While Passing Sun - East Idaho News
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Comet ISON May Have Disintegrated While Passing Sun

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NASA 112813 CometISON?  SQUARESPACE CACHEVERSION=1385662826922ESA/NASA/SOHO(NEW YORK) —  Comet ISON, which could have ended up as an astounding show in the sky this winter, may have broken up while passing the sun on Thursday.

The comet, named after the International Scientific Optical Network that discovered it last year, made its closest approach to the sun at 1:37 p.m. ET, and may have been torn asunder.

On Thursday morning, Don Yeomans, a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said that the comet’s fate wasn’t sealed. He said that the comet could make it past the sun unscathed.

“Or the sun could actually pull it apart,” he said. “If the comet is very weak, it could break up into a cloud of dust.”

If the comet isn’t ground to a pulp, Yeomans said vigilant skywatchers would be in for a treat come early December. “It could be tough enough to survive the passage of the sun and be a fairly bright naked-eye object in the early morning sky,” he said. He added that the comet could also be pulled apart into several chunks by the sun’s tidal forces and still make for a good show.

But there’s more to comet ISON than whether it breaks apart or not. “It’s coming from the very edge of our solar system, so it still retains the primordial ices from which it formed four and a half billion years ago,” said Yeomans. “We’re going to find out a great deal about what this comet is made of, and hence we are going to find out a great deal about what the solar system was like [back then].”

The comet’s journey will take it approximately 730,000 miles away from the sun’s surface. But NASA warns people not to look too closely. “As always, never look directly at the sun,” said NASA. The space agency added that it would post photos of the comet taken from the Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft, starting at 12:45 p.m. ET.

Copyright 2013 ABC News Radio

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