Comet Ison Lives: Reports Of Its Death Were Premature

Comet Ison has survived its encounter with the sun. NASA reported that the comet had disintegrated, and its cameras seemed to support that. Some hours after, with everyone believing the ‘comet of the century’ had been vaporized into oblivion…it somehow revived, ‘regrew’ its two tails and continued on its way, brightening as it went.

Ison is now moving away from the sun, and there’s a good chance that we will be able to see it without a telescope from as early as December 3rd. The time immediately preceding sunrise, and just after sunset will be the optimum time for viewing Ison.

Karl Battams from NASA has a working hypothesis:

“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.” (source)

Other space news:

Todays sunspot number is 95. NOAA predicts the possibility of M-class flares at 25% today and of X-class as 0.5%. There are no coronal holes facing Earth at this point.

A coronal mass ejection blasted out on the far side of the sun yesterday. The area responsible for the blast will rotate to the Earth facing side of our star over the coming days.

Also on the 29th an 8 yard wide asteroid passed Earth at a distance of approximately 60,000 miles, four times closer than the moon. NASA reports that the rock was never in danger of colliding with Earth.