Sun Devouring A Comet GIF Has A Metaphorical Lesson For Us, Here’s What It Is

This week an overenthusiastic comet reportedly tried getting too close to the Sun, forgetting that the Sun is the Sun for a reason or that it rules the Solar System. The puny icy chunk of dust, happy in its own carefree journey, was destroyed when the Sun vaporized it and tore it apart, and that is what apparently happens to straying celestial objects.

A comet, traveling ~1.3 million miles per hour, plunged toward the sun on Aug. 3-4. Watch: https://t.co/lpoAQRgMO3 pic.twitter.com/oQdQtsE5qH

— NASA (@NASA) August 4, 2016

The comet's journey, which was travelling at a speed of 1.3 million miles per hour, was captured by ESA and NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) during its deathly journey. The comet, which was seen plunging towards our star on August 3-4 after being first spotted on August 1, belonged to the Kreutz group of comets that are remnants of a huge comet from which they tore away thousands of years ago. Incidentally, comets are chunks of ice and dust that have elliptical orbits that see them travelling far beyond Pluto's orbit, when they are at their farthest. Coming back to our overzealous comet, it did not actually drop into our star but rather went whipping around it, when it was vaporized by the Sun's strong forces. The white circle in the image above shows the Sun's disk.

So how does the whole process of the comet getting torn apart by the Sun teach us a metaphorical lesson? As you can see in the GIF, the death of the comet and the whole process is extremely true and also applicable to our lives, and the many jolting situations life has a way of throwing at us. One minute we may find ourselves riding high on life, assuming that nothing can go wrong and we are in total control of a situation, but the next moment everything goes kaput. It takes only a moment for life to show us our true place, and remind us that in spite of everything we are not in control. There is a massive powerful force, the nature of life itself, which is stronger than any one of us, a fact that most of humankind somehow tends to forget about.