An enhanced image of Comet ISON taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in May 2013. Credit: NASA
Comet ISON, a bright ball of frozen matter from the earliest days of the universe, was inbound from the Oort Cloud at the edge of the solar system and expected to pierce the Sun’s corona on Nov. 28. Scientists were expecting quite a show. But instead of a brilliant cosmic display, there was … nothing. “The first thing we did was make sure that we had definitely seen nothing,” said Paul Bryans, NCAR, who was looking for the comet using NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory. “We did image processing just to make sure nothing was there, and it wasn’t. But that’s not necessarily a boring result. That can tell us something.”
“We think that the most likely thing that happened is that Comet ISON broke up b...
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