Comet Ikeya-Murakami

This extraordinary image reveals the ancient comet 332P/Ikeya-Murakami disintegrating as it approached the Sun in 2016, capturing one of the most detailed views of a comet's catastrophic breakup. The comet debris field consists of building-size chunks of primordial ice and rock near the center of the image, each fragment representing a piece of material that has remained virtually unchanged since the solar system's formation 4.5 billion years ago. The bright object at lower left is the main nucleus of the comet, the largest remaining piece of the original body. As solar heating weakened the comet's structure, it shattered into dozens of fragments that now drift along its orbital path. This disintegration event provides astronomers with an unprecedented opportunity to study the internal composition and structural properties of these ancient icy wanderers, revealing clues about the conditions in the early solar nebula and the building blocks that formed our planetary system.