Experts said it appears ISON broke up into chunks and the Sun evaporated it.

‘The fate of comet ISON during its trip around the sun today is not yet established. It’s likely it didn’t survive’, reported NASA at its Twitter.

Nevertheless, according to Johns Hopkins University scientist Carey Lisse, even if the comet has died there is a good chance that people on the Earth will get an interesting cosmic show. The comet’s remnants could paint the sky with a wide swath of green in the Northern Hemisphere.

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The comet ISON, so-called comet of the century, will reach its closest approach passing the Sun at a distance of just 1.1 million kilometers (730,000 miles) on November 28 at 18.35 GMT. “That’s less than the diameter of the Sun, so it’s really close,” says scientist Michael Khan of the European Space Agency. Astronomers are anxiously waiting to see if the comet survives its encounter with the Sun.

There are guesses that say it may be brighter than Venus or it might be as bright as the Moon. However, before entering the most perilous stage of its journey ISON became hardly ever visible to the naked eye. Now it is too close to the Sun, so don’t look for ISON during the day on November 28. NASA and ESA spacecrafts are trained on the Sun, so they will post images all the time.

Here is what we can see:

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Since the perihelion of comet ISON is coming up on Thursday, November 28th, we thought how wonderful it would be to track it together. So we’ll be giving 100 free codes to 100 random winners: 50 codes for Star Walk for iPhone and 50 codes for Star Walk for iPad. Hope you enter! Clear skies!

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Astronomy community is buzzing as a beehive – comet ISON finally lit up. Until recently it was humbly flying towards the Sun, showing the brightness in accordance with most pessimistic predictions. The brightness was slowly crawling to apparent magnitude of 8  (8m). However, on November 15th a bright flash raised the light of the comet to a limit visible to the naked eye.

(c) ESO

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