Comet ISON Survives Perihelion (Barely)

An anonymous reader sends this update from NightSkyInfo: "Yesterday, when Comet ISON plunged through the solar atmosphere and behind SOHO's coronagraph (the black disk designed to block out the direct light from the Sun), its nucleus dwindled away to nothing and most of the tail simply evaporated. Everyone assumed that the comet completely disintegrated and died a fiery death. However, several hours after perihelion, ISON began to brighten up again. It is now distinctly evident on live images from SOHO, looks like a comet, and continues to brighten as it moves farther away from the Sun." Experts are unwilling to say precisely how intact the comet is — we'll need more data to make a conclusion about that — but astrophysicist Karl Battams says this is their best guess: '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 form of that long thin tail we saw in the LASCO C2 images. Then, as ISON plunged through the corona, it continued to fall apart and vaporize, and lost its coma and tail completely just like Lovejoy did in 2011. (We have our theories as to why it didn't show up in the SDO images but that's not our story to tell - the SDO team will do that.) Then, 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. In essence, the tail is growing back, as Lovejoy's did.' Here's a GIF of the comet rounding the Sun (put together by Emily Lakdawalla).

Re:A Tail's Tale

[mbone]

The linked gif seems [amazonaws.com] to show the debris "tail" mostly flowing back along the comet's direction of travel, with some off-axis blow evident in the later post-encounter image. I would have expected the "tail" to always be pointing *away* from the sun as it made this fly-by. Derp?

-DC

There are generally two tails - the dust tail (which lies along the orbit path, like bread-crumbs in a fairy tale) and the (plasma) gas tail (which is blown by the solar wind, mostly directly away from the Sun). When you are just past perihelion ( as at the end of the linked-to video above) the dust tail can actually point (more or less) towards the Sun.