Comet Lovejoy leaves intact after crossing the Sun

Against all odds, Comet Lovejoy has survived its encounter with the Sun in the early hours of last Friday, even though astronomers expected this "dirty snowball" to approach 140,000 kilometers from the solar surface. it would evaporate almost immediately. Not surprisingly, temperatures in the corona can reach 2 million degrees Celsius .

However, images taken by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) show that the ice object emerged "unharmed" behind the Sun an hour after its "suicide dive", moving back into the space.

"It's incredible," said Karl Battams of the US Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. "I didn't think the nucleus of Comet Lovejoy was big enough to survive after diving for an hour into the millions of degrees of the solar corona, but it's still there," he explained with surprise. Experts estimate that the diameter of the comet must measure at least 500 meters for it to survive. And that most likely it has lost some of its mass while passing through the "hell" of the solar corona.