A comet plunged into the sun this week just as a huge eruption exploded from the star's surface, but the two events are likely not related, NASA scientists say.
NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) spotted the ill-fated comet diving toward the sun between Tuesday and Wednesday (May 10 and 11), never to be seen again.
By coincidence, a massive explosion on the sun called a coronal mass ejection also erupted at about the same time. Coronal mass ejections are immense bursts of plasma that hurl solar particles away from the sun at incredible speeds.
