Figure: A coronal mass ejection (CME) tears off the tail of Comet Encke

Caption: A coronal mass ejection (CME) blows past Comet Encke and tears away comet's tail. Click on the image and then click on the next image to see NASA 7-second comet video.

Further explication:

1. A coronal mass ejection is a very strong blast of the solar wind.

2. A comet is a rocky-icy body on a high eccentricity elliptical orbit that causes it to plunge into the inner Solar System where sunlight heats it and causes explosive evaporation of the comet's ices.

3. Comets CANNOT live forever. After some number of passes near the Sun, all their ices have been evaporated and they become extinct comets which are very similar to asteroids. In fact, they are like near-Earth asteroids which means that astronomical perturbations will on the time scale of 10 Myr cause them to impact an inner Solar System astro-body (Sun, Earth, etc.) or be gravitational assisted out of the inner Solar System and in some cases on an escape orbit from the Solar System.

4. For information on the NASA video, see NASA Science, "The Sun Rips off a Comet's Tail", 2007 Oct01 (now dead link) and spacecraft STEREO (2006--c.2020s). Comet Encke was just inside the orbit of Mecury when this NASA video was captured by spacecraft STEREO (2006--c.2020s). The NASA video is probably in white light (see Wikipedia: STEREO: Science instrumentation: Sun Earth Connection Coronal and Heliospheric Investigation (SECCHI)).