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MrPlow writes:

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Comets in our solar system that travel to its interior in their highly elliptical orbits tend to come close to the Sun before heading out again to the cold, far reaches of the Solar System again — the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune or even farther out, beyond Pluto, to the Oort Cloud. The heating up of the frozen comet, when it nears the Sun, causes it to display the large tail that is its hallmark.

But sometimes, a sungrazing comet — a term for comets that pass extremely close to the Sun on their nearest approach to it — gets too close to the center of the Solar System and instead of whipping around our star, it plunges to a fiery death. However, there are other ways for a comet to die and one such incident was captured on camera by NASA and European Space Agency's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) on Aug. 3-4.

Source: International Business Times

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