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Comet Lovejoy, comet surives sun, comets, Lovejoy, solar dynamics observatory, sun, sungrazer, Terry Lovejoy
Everyone expected the comet Lovejoy to die a fiery death when it came face to face with the sun yesterday.
Boy, were they wrong.
Breaking News! Lovejoy lives! The comet Lovejoy has survived it’s journey around the sun to reemerge on the other side.
That’s the tweet from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) that shocked us all.
There seemed to be no chance of survival for the icy comet, which was discovered by Terry Lovejoy in late November. The sun can reach temperatures of 2 million degrees F. How could Lovejoy survive?
Here’s the video:
The comet wasn’t expected to crash into the sun. Lovejoy was expected to skim its surface. “These comets are Sungrazing not sun crashing, so the comet followed the orbit around the back side to come out the other side,” the SDO tweeted last night.
However, that still doesn’t explain how the comet didn’t vaporize as it approached the scorching sun. Could its size have anything to do with it? Lovejoy is as wide as two football fields, according to NASA, much larger than other sungrazer comets. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Check out this play by play on a sungrazer site. Scroll to the bottom: “I don’t know where to begin. I simply don’t know. What an extraordinary 24hrs! I suppose the first thing to say is this: I was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. And I have never been so happy to be wrong”
🙂 More updates to come.