ISON comet has lost individual fragments

One or more chunks could have split off from the nucleus of comet ISON in recent days. Two wing-like structures in the gaseous environment of the comet, which have been photographed by a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research and the Wendelstein Observatory of the Ludwig Maximilian Universität Munich, seem to indicate this; the structures appear on images which were taken at the end of last week. This detachment of individual pieces of debris could possible explain the comet's recent increase in brightness.

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