Icy Comet Escapes Sun’s Fiery Grip

It may only be ten percent of what it once was but Comet Lovejoy managed to graze the sun and survive, mostly intact. It lost its long trailing tail and a lot of its ice exterior when it made a close encounter with the sun last week.

The comet was discovered earlier this month by an Australian amateur astronomer, named Terry Lovejoy. He spotted the comet, first called Kreutz sungrazing Comet C/2011, in broad daylight with his Celestron C8 telescope and a Canon camera.

This is the first time since the 1970s that a ground-based telescope has spotted a comet of this class. Thanks to Lovejoy’s observations space-based telescopes could be trained to watch what scientists thought was going to be the demise of the newly discovered comet.

It was set to be a routine comet suicide. Astronomers had watched this happen 2,000 times before and no comet had ever survived a brush with the broiling sun. They thought that the comet would melt away on December 15 when it entered a zone around the sun where temperatures reach several million degrees.

NASA had a front row seat, with telescopes pointed at Comet Lovejoy as it made its final solar approach. First astronomers reported they saw the sun’s corona “wiggle” as the comet got close to the sun.

Karl Battams tells the Associated Press, “I was delighted when I saw it go into the sun.” It’s quite a treat to witness a relatively infrequent event like this live. But he says, “I was astounded when I saw something re-emerge.”

Comet Lovejoy was a shadow of its former millions of tons self. Dean Pesnell, a NASA scientists who tracked the comet’s hair-raising journey says, “It looks like the tail broke off and is stuck” in the sun’s magnetic field. The comet spent more than an hour in the sun’s grip.

The comet came within 90,000 miles of the sun and didn’t disappear, leaving astronomers scratching their heads and scientists at NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory excited to study the phenomenon.

Some say to survive the dirty snowball was much bigger than originally thought and others say the comet may have a rocky core.

Pesnell equates this event with an ice cube being placed on a hot barbeque grill. He says this comet is related to a comet that buzzed Earth back in 1106.

After surviving its perilous trip to the sun, it now continues to make its wide orbital swing through the solar system. Astronomers think it’ll be another 800 or 900 years before it gets close enough to the sun again. That’s plenty of time for it to build back up and regrow its missing tail.