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Comet ISON Update: 3 Things that Could Happen on Thanksgiving

Comet ISON's Thanksgiving travel plans: Will it survive to dazzle or be destroyed to dust?

Comet ISON is headed to the sun for a little, big maneuver that is being watched by astronomers worldwide.

Thanksgiving is the comet's biggest day in, oh, 5 billion years or so. Really.

That's how long it's been traveling toward the Thanksgiving brush with the sun and Thursday is when Comet ISON will either survive to dazzle or explode to little more than dust.

On Thanksgiving, the comet will do one of three things, according to the experts at Earthsky.org:

  1. It could be tough enough to survive the passage of the sun and be a fairly bright naked-eye object in the early morning sky in the first week of December.
  2. The sun could actually pull it apart. In that case, it could split into several chunks rounding the sun and putting on a great show again in early December. 
  3. Goodbye, Comet ISON, we hardly knew ye. If the comet is very weak, it could break up into nothingness, and the potential for it to become the Comet of the Century will make it ... nothing.


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