Comet Lovejoy Plunges Into the Sun and Survives

Posted by timothy on Saturday December 17, 2011 @06:00PM from the part-of-brian-aker's-career-path dept.

boldie writes with a link to NASA's account of comet Lovejoy's close encounter with the sun. Excerpting: "This morning, an armada of spacecraft witnessed something that many experts thought impossible. Comet Lovejoy flew through the hot atmosphere of the sun and emerged intact. ... The comet's close encounter was recorded by at least five spacecraft: NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory and twin STEREO probes, Europe's Proba2 microsatellite, and the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory. The most dramatic footage so far comes from SDO, which saw the comet go in (movie) and then come back out again (movie)." Here are larger QuickTime versions of the comet's entrance (22MB) and exit (26MB).

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Misleading title by aneroid · 2011-12-17 18:12 · Score: 5, Insightful

Sounds a lot more sensational when you compare the title's "comet plunges into sun and survives" event vs the actual "comet flew through hot atmosphere of the sun".
/. worthy event nevertheless.
1. Re:Misleading title by JTW · 2011-12-18 03:55 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  A thought experiment worthy.
  If you took a ball of Iron the size of say planet Earth, and it were to plunge into the heart of the Sun. What would be the result.. a Nova, SuperNova.. fizzle.
  And what if it were slightly off target and merely circled the center for a while.. would it retain its shape or spinout into a smeared ball of plasma.. undoing the star?
  Something somewhat like this probably already happened.. the Lithium content of our star for example.. guess it just wasn't significant emough.