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COMET ISON LIVES (UPDATED): Cancel the funeral. Comet ISON is back from the dead. Yesterday, Nov. 28th, Comet ISON flew through the sun's atmosphere and appeared to disintegrate before the cameras of several NASA and ESA spacecraft. This prompted reports of the comet's demise. Today, the comet has revived and is rapidly brightening. Click to view a SOHO coronagraph movie of the solar flyby (updated Nov. 29 @ 1800 UT):
Before the flyby, experts had made many predictions about what might happen to the comet, ranging from utter disintegration to glorious survival. No one predicted both.
"As comet ISON plunged towards to the Sun, it began to fall apart, losing not giant fragments but at least a lot of reasonably sized chunks. There's evidence of very large dust in the long thin tail we saw in the [SOHO coronagraph] images. Then, as ISON plunged through the corona, it continued to fall apart and vaporize, losing its coma and tail completely just like sungrazing Comet Lovejoy did in 2011. What emerged from the Sun was a small but perhaps somewhat coherent nucleus that has resumed emitting dust and gas for at least the time being."
Battams emphasizes that it is too soon to tell how big the remnant nucleus is or how bright the resurgent comet will ultimately become. ......
Astrophotographer Babak Tafreshi has edited an HD video that compares views of ISON from both of SOHO's coronagraphs. "It seems the comet could become a naked eye object with several degrees of scattered tail by Dec 2nd or 3rd," he predicts.
Realtime Comet ISON Photo Gallery
NRaleighLiberal
(60,015 posts)2naSalit
(86,646 posts)Thanks for posting that. I was just having a chat with my neighbor about this.
RobertEarl
(13,685 posts)Just read a new theory about this thing.... what we see is some kind of electrical 'burn'. The electricity is solar electricity, and as this rock got closer to the sun it reacted more, ie, burned brighter.
Then as it got up close, the electrical charge, being nearly equal on its path, there was less burn. IOW, the sun has several layers of electrical charges which increase in charge the nearer the sun.
Ison could have a polar opposite charge to the sun's?