Nasa and the European Space Agency have captured an amazing video of the moment a comet began a spectacular death plunge into the Sun.
The nameless comet - said to be minuscule, just tens of meters in diameter - still created enough of an impact to be captured by the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory spacecraft.
The comet flew headlong into the Sun and disintegrated under the intense pressure of solar radiation.
Comet Ison - formerly predicted to be the "comet of the century" when it grazes the Sun later this year - is a similar type of "sun grazer" comet to the one captured in the video, above - but scientists are unsure whether it will live up to the hopes of astronomers.
It recently became lost in the Sun's glare and reemerged weeks later it was significantly more dim than it had been previously.