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Comet Crashes Into Sun, Causes Huge Explosion


From camillasdo

The life of a comet is not always long-lived. Take the case of this comet, discovered only on Friday September 30, 2011 by an amateur astronomer, which plunged into the Sun on Saturday October 1, 2011.

A Coronal Mass Ejection (CME) exploded and the Corongraph of NASA/ESA’s SOHO captured the explosion. The interesting thing about this is that up to now, solar scientists do not believe that a comet can trigger a Coronal Mass Ejection.

The first two segments in this video are from October 1, 2011 and were observed by NASA/ESA’s SOHO spacecraft. The last two segments were captured by NASA’s SDO on July 5, 2011.

Credit: NASA/ESA SOHO and NASA SDO

via dvice