Space is crazy today. Supermassive gas-guzzling black holes, celestial angels and now the Silver Surfer on collision course with the Sun: it’s comet Lovejoy approaching our home star. It will pass behind the solar limb on December 15, around 7pm Eastern Time.
The Helioviewer Project says that there “is a chance the comet will survive its encounter with the Sun” but it looks like not even Galactus would be able to protect this one. Apparently, the comet may have already disintegrated into a “cloud of ionized gas for us to see it” using the instrumentation of the Solar Dynamics Observatory.
Both the SDO and the Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph (LASCO) on board the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) are now tracking the comet as it zooms towards the centre of our Solar System. [Helioviewer.org via Geeked on Goddard]