Comet Lovejoy in the NASA SDO AIA images, Dec 2011

This is sungrazing comet C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy) making its inbound passage through the solar corona in December 2011. Only about 300meters wide, and just skimming 140,000km above the solar surface, comet Lovejoy did emerge from the million-degree solar atmosphere, but catastrophically fractured. Within two weeks of this date, Lovejoy's dust tail was all that remained, with the nucleus completely disintegrated.