On the evening of Tuesday, July 5, 2011 a comet flew into the sun. Such comets are not unusual, and they're called "sungrazers" since they come so close to the star that they lose a great deal of mass during the approach or evaporate and disappear completely. However, no one has actually seen the end of that journey - until now. The most famous sungrazer in recent time was Comet Ikeya-Seki. In 1965 it appeared out of nowhere, dove toward the sun and swooped over the sun's surface only 450,000 km away. Because Ikeya-Seki's nucleus was large, about 5 km wide, it survived the encounter and emerged as one of the brightest comets of the past thousand years.