While the gif of the comet’s death plunge appears to show it falling into the sun, that’s not the full story.
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The disk of the sun is represented by the white circle in this image.
According to Spaceweather.com, Kreutz comets travel along what is called the Kreutz path, a single orbit that takes 800 years to complete.
The video is particularly stunning thanks to the incredible coronal mass ejection (basically a solar explosion) happening on the left-most limb of the sun in the clip.
The event, captured between Aug 2 and Aug 4, shows the comet getting vaporized by the intense forces near the sun just as it came too close.
The comet was first spotted on August 1st.
An image released by NASA on Thursday captured a comet’s final moments as it raced toward the sun this week at close to 1.3 million miles per hour.
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Joe Gurman, mission scientist for Soho at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland said “Soho has a view of about 12-and-a-half million miles beyond the sun”. So we expected it might from time to time see a bright comet near the sun. “But nobody dreamed we’d approach 200 a year”.
