About two years ago, the Comet Lovejoy, or C/2011 W3 as it is officially known, dived into the sun's unforgivingly hot atmosphere and emerged intact.
The comet came within a just 87,000 miles of the sun's surface as it flew by on Dec. 15 and 16, 2011. Just for the sake of comparison, NASA's Solar Probe Plus, set to be launched in 2018, will come within about 3.7 million miles of the sun's surface - more than 40 times as distant as Lovejoy's encounter.
"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.
The extraordinary feat not only amazed scientists, but also provided them with tons of data to improve our understanding of the dynamics in the corona of our Mother Star.
Having taken their time to study the data, researchers have made some surprising finds not only about how the comet survived, but about our own sun.
The findings were published in the journal Science.
For one, scientists figured out 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.
