Is Comet Ison Kaput?

A blast of particles from the sun called a coronal mass ejection, or CME, is seen at the right of this image taken on Nov. 22 by the STEREO-A spacecraft. (The sun is not actually visible.) Comet Ison is at the extreme left of the image. A smaller comet, Encke, is also visible, as is Mercury and the Earth. It is not known for sure whether this CME actually hit Ison. But the image does provide a sense of the increasingly violent environment the comet is encountering as it comes ever closer to the sun. (Source: Karl Battams/NRL/NASA-CIOC) I've been closely following NASA's status reports about Comet Ison, which is three days out from its expected closest approach to the sun. And the latest report raises the possibility that the answer to the question posed in the headline is, well, "maybe." Karl Battams, an astrophysicist and computational scientist based at ...