On Monday, August 19, researchers at the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory captured a comet’s final moments as it shot straight for the sun. While events like this happen relatively often, a coincidental explosion on the sun’s surface and the comet’s perfect size made for an impressive and rare sighting.

“With a diameter of perhaps a few tens of meters, this comet was clearly far too small to survive the intense bombardment of solar radiation,” Karl Battams, working for the Naval Research Laboratory, told Spaceweather.com. Comets are comprised of dust and ice, which start to melt by the sun’s heat or break apart by its gravitational pull. Usually, comets that cannot withstand the sun’s gravitational pull or heat are only tens of meters across, too small for our telescopes to see. The one the camera caught, however, was about 100 meters across, big enough for us to see, but still too small to fly safely pass the sun.

In the video when the comet meets its fate, it appears to have exploded upon impact; however, that was simply happenstance. The flash was actually the result of an explosion on the other side of the sun, which caused a coronal mass ejection, or a huge burst of solar wind and magnetic fields that released into space.

NASA officials and the European Space Agency operate the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, which was launched back in 1995 and has since discovered more than 2,400 comets. The comet it discovered on Monday was most likely a member of the Kreutz sungrazer family, according to SpaceWeather.com. Sungrazers are comets that pass by very close to the sun during their orbit. The most famous class of comets is the Kreutz sungrazers, named after German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz who discovered them over 100 years ago. More than 1,400 of these ice balls have since been discovered, and scientists suspect that these comets are actually fragments of a much larger comet—about 12-26 miles wide—that had broken up centuries ago.

NASA is preparing for another sungrazer to make its appearance in the night sky soon. ISON is expected to pass close to the sun sometime in November, though unlike the unnamed one, it should survive its close encounter with the sun. As the comet nears the sun, the rays will heat it, turning it into a bright object that we should be able to see during the day. Many are looking to ISON as the comet of the century.