Science & Technology

Comet ISON Believed to Have Disintegrated While Passing Sun

No comet of the century that one

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It appears there will be no once-in-a-lifetime celestial light show this month as Comet ISON streaks past Earth trailed by a glorious tail of ice, water, rock, and dust.

On Monday, one of the leading ISON watchers, Karl Battams of the U.S. Navy's Sungrazer Comets citizen science project and the NASA-sponsored comet ISON observing campaign, posted a eulogy for ISON, which is now believed to have disintegrated into millions of fragments as it swung around the sun, coming within a million miles of the star's surface.