Comet ISON: Roasted by the Sun, Vanishes But Maybe Survived

Call it a cosmic holiday miracle. The much-anticipated Comet ISON appeared to disintegrate during its Thanksgiving Day slingshot around the sun Thursday, but something — it seems — may have survived.

The sungrazing Comet ISON vanished from the view of NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) during an extremely close encounter with the sun on Thursday, leading scientists to suspect the worst.

"We didn't see Comet ISON in SDO," said Dean Pesnell, project scientist for SDO. "So we think it must have broken up and evaporated before it reached perihelion."

But late Thursday night, images from another sun-watching spacecraft, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) run by NASA and the European Space Agency, picked up a blip of something rounding the sun in a camera called LASCO C3. Read more...