National Geographic had explained what ISON would experience on Thursday: The comet has grown more t

Most of ISON, a comet formed at the birth of the solar system, apparently did not survive Thursday s encounter with the sun, NASA said. Scientists detected the comet last year and had hoped to continue studying it for information to be mined from its primordial ices.
Initially when something came out (after close approach), we thought this is just the dust trail and there s not much left, it s just going to fade away, he said. And then images keep coming los angeles map in and the last few, it seems pretty definitely los angeles map like it s getting brighter. So we do not have a good answer as to what s going on.
My best guess right now, and it s really only an educated guess, is that there is something left, probably smaller fragments, because it still doesn t look like there s a nuclear condensation. Inbound, the leading los angeles map edge was brighter. It doesn t look like that. It just looks to me like there are some smaller fragments that may just actually be disintegrating. They just took longer to do it.
ISON s closest approach to the sun, called its perihelion, occurred at about 1:45 p.m. ET, when it got 724,000 miles from the sun s surface. (By comparison, Earth is almost 93 million miles from the sun.)
Phil Plait, an astronomer who runs the Bad Astronomy blog , told AP that scientists might still be able to gain valuable knowledge from studying the remnants of the broken comet. This is a time capsule looking back at the birth of the solar system, he said.
National Geographic had explained what ISON would experience on Thursday: The comet has grown more than ten times brighter in recent days. As it plunges through the sun s outer atmosphere, the comet s icy nucleus will begin to experience intense gravitational forces and temperatures los angeles map that reach as high as 5000 degrees Fahrenheit.
It s coming from the very edge of our solar system so it [still] retains the primordial ices from which it formed four-and-a-half billion years ago. It s been traveling from the outer edge of the solar system for about five-and-a-half million years to reach us in the inner solar system, and it s going to make an extremely close approach to the sun and hence could become very bright los angeles map and possibly a very easy naked-eye object in early December.
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