Comet Lovejoy Hurtles through Sun and Reveals its Secrets with Wiggling Tail (Video)

Comet Lovejoy has accomplished a feat that's put other space missiles to shame. The daredevil flew through the hot atmosphere of the sun and emerged intact. That's not all, though. A veritable armada of spacecraft was there to witness the event, leaving scientists with a wealth of data to pour over. Now, researchers have analyzed that data and have made some surprising finds not only about how the comet survived, but about our own sun.

Comet Lovejoy was first discovered in December of 2011 by amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy. It's actually part of a member of a family of sungrazing comets, which are known for their typically small size and prolific nature. In fact, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory sees one of these comets fall into the sun every few days. The fact that this particular comet survived, though, is astounding.

"I did not think the comet's icy core was big enough to survive plunging through the several million degree solar corona for close to an hour, but Comet Lovejoy is still with us," said Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab in a news release at the time the phenomenon occurred.

Now, though, researchers have discovered how Lovejoy hurtled through the sun virtually unscathed. They studied the images captured by five NASA spacecraft which showed the comet becoming increasingly bright as it entered the solar corona. There, it encountered temperatures that rocketed up to the millions of degrees. Yet as the comet entered the corona, its tail began to wiggle.

"The tail is not following the comet's head perfectly as we could expect it to follow," said Karl Schrijver of the Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Center, one of the researchers, in an interview with BBC News. "Its tail gets locked onto the sun's magnetic field, and gets flicked back and forth."

It's this magnetic field that's revealing new insights into the sun itself. Scientists are using computer models in an attempt to understand the sun's atmosphere and magnetic field--two crucial components when it comes to predicting phenomena like solar flares and coronal mass ejections. By studying the way the comet's tail wiggled, the researchers can examine how the sun's magnetic field reacts.

In the end, though, it turns out that there wasn't any strange reason why the comet survived; it was simply bigger than all of the others. Researchers estimate that the comet's core was at least 1,600 feet in diameter in order to survive the encounter.

While the comet did survive, it didn't last for long. Only two days after flying into the sun, Comet Lovejoy disintegrated. Yet its sacrifice wasn't in vain. The data has aided scientists in their research. Now, they're looking forward to the next comet that's set to graze by our sun--Comet ISON.

The latest findings were published in the journal Science.

Want to see the comet's fiery plunge? You can check it out in the video below, originally appearing here.