Happy 4th of July! Comet ISON Shows Off Fireworks with Stunning Tail (Video)

Just in time for the Fourth of July, comet ISON is showing off some fireworks of its own. Currently hurtling toward the sun at a speeding 48,000 miles per hour, the comet is leaving behind a stunning tail that NASA has now captured with its Hubble Space Telescope.

The swift motion of the comet is imaged in a time-lapse movie made from a sequence of pictures taken on May 8. At the time, the comet was 403 million miles from Earth, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Although the pictures themselves were taken over a 43-minute span, the movie compresses them into just five seconds; in the brief clip, the comet travels a spectacular 34,000 miles, or 7 percent of the distance between Earth and the moon.

While it looks like the comet may be "burning," though, it's not. ISON is essentially composed of ice, dust and gas. The tail that you see is, in fact, a streamer of gas and dust bleeding off of the icy nucleus, which is surrounding by a bright star-like-looking coma. The pressure of the solar wind is what seeps the material into a tail--like a breeze blowing a windsock.

As the comet approaches the sun, its rate of sublimation will increase. Sublimation is a process that's similar to evaporation in which solid matter transitions directly into gas, which means that the comet's tail will grow longer. In November, ISON will probably be visible to the naked eye as it passes near our sun.

In fact, the comet has been labeled the "comet of the century" by media outlets. Although scientists are currently unsure exactly how bright the comet will become, it's still expected to be quite the show. With a tail that's estimated to reach over 40,000 miles long, ISON will give scientists an opportunity to watch how the dust and gas frozen in the comet will change and evolve as it's heated during its passage close to the sun.

Want to see the comet in action? Check out the video below, courtesy of YouTube and NASA.