It's almost unbelievable how an object "tens of meters" in diameter can affect an object nearly 1.4 Billion meters in diameter.
Just startling.
(Note, comets average 20k mph, so we're still talking maybe 2/1000th's of a percent of c, right? It's not like it's a relativistic bomb or anything... yet billions of meters away, a light burst nearly instantaneous upon impact.)
Friday, August 23, 2013, 10:31 AM - NASA and the European Space Agency's
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) has managed to capture a comet
colliding with the sun, **appearing to explode as it approaches.**
At approximately the same time, the sun let out a large coronal mass
ejection (CME), looking as if the comet triggered the event.
In fact, the CME was caused by an explosion on the other side of the star.
The icy space body was simply too small to have any impact.Indeed. I clicked to watch the video of a comet exploding---not read about it!