Space Events

RIP Comet ISON

Comet ISON broke apart during its highly anticipated solar flyby on Nov. 28, emerging from behind the sun as a diffuse cloud of dust that has since all but dissipated in the darkness of deep space.

Comet ISON, which was discovered by two Russian amateur astronomers in September 2012, was making its first trip to the inner solar system from the distant and frigid Oort Cloud. The comet skimmed just 684,000 miles (1.1 million kilometres) above the surface of the sun on Nov. 28.

Comet ISON's perilous journey was tracked closely by skywatchers, who hoped the icy wanderer would put on a great celestial show, and scientists, who watched the gases boiling off ISON to learn more about comet composition and structure.

Both groups had hoped the viewing campaign would last beyond perihelion, or closest approach, but Comet ISON couldn't survive the sun's intense heat and powerful gravitational pull.

"At this point, it seems like there's nothing left," comet expert Karl Battams, of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., said here today at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

Comet ISON comes in from the bottom right and moves out toward the upper right, getting fainter and fainter, in this time-lapse image from the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory on Nov. 28, 2013. The image of the sun at the centre is from NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory.