"Comet" Lovejoy survived almost an hour in ove a million degrees of heat in the Sun's corona, 87K from the surface. Comets are balls of ice and snow.
Here's your Home Science Experiment: Place an ice cube in a pan under a 500 degree broiler for a half hour. Observe what happens.
Now, based on your observation, try to explain how "Comet" Lovejoy could possibly be made of ice.
Oh yeah, and for extra credit, explain why the Sun's X-Ray flux flatlined for two days during Lovejoy's approach.
That's one tough ice cube!
Fun with science. Melting follows a cube law for surface area/size. A comet has a hell of a lot of mass with a small surface area.
Also fun with science.... While the temperature of the individual molecules in the corona of the sun may be 10e6 degrees (F or C, at that temp it doesn't matter)... the density of them does.
You would die of explosive decompression before you burned to death, should you show up there, clothed as you were born.
All cooks know this kind of stuff. We have to deal with heat/ice/vaccuum/pressure stuff all of the time.
/johnny
Comets are not “balls of ice and snow”. Comets are rocks (or piles of smaller rocks) mixed with various hydrocarbons, also ammonia (NH3), water ice, and varying traces of other things (the green comet of a year or two ago was shedding chlorine, for example).
Comets shed their gases and liquids at different rates, depending on how deep in the body they are buried, and how much energy is received from the Sun. The number of times they’re able to do that has to do with the orbit and amount of gases and liquids they have at the beginning. Eventually they shed all of it and continue on a more stable but still eccentric orbit, remaining dark. Eventually they have one or more encounters with other bodies.
Asteroids are largely known from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, but the Earth-crossers are probably the rocky remains of comets, or were shed from comets. A number of the various annual meteor showers have been associated with specific comets, and continue to travel as a debris stream in one of the old paths taken by the parent comets.