All eyes on the sky that can do so will be pointing toward Comet ISON soon, as a massive international observing campaign gets underway to watch what could become the “comet of the century,” scientists say.

Comet ISON was discovered in September 2012, and is due to swoop in close to the sun in November. When it does, it may become as bright as the full moon, visible to the naked eye even in daylight. Or, it may not.

What will happen to Comet ISON is an open question to scientists, who hope to learn more about what causes certain comets to flare brightlyand others to fizzle out and evaporate under the sun’s radiation.
NASA .

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These images from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope of Comet ISON were taken on June 13, 2013, when ISON …

Uncertain fate

“We don’t have anything to directly compare to ISON,” astronomer Matthew Knight of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., said Thursday here at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory during a two-day workshop on observing ISON. Based on historical records, he said, very large comets tend to survive their encounters with the sun, while smaller ones evaporate or break into pieces under the harsh solar radiation. Comet ISON is a mid-sized comet, and its fate is very uncertain.

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