Guest
It’s bright, and it’s doomed. A new comet just discovered by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) is plunging toward the sun where solar heating will almost certainly tear it apart. “I know it doesn’t look like much now, but this comet could become really bright--perhaps 2nd or 3rd magnitude as it passes by the sun on Thursday and Friday,“ says Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in Washington DC. The comet is a Kreutz sungrazer--a fragment from the breakup of a giant comet many centuries ago.
