Viewers compared the explosion's appearance to a giant exclamation point. The nucleus was only about a mile and too small for Hubble to see. Intense solar heating triggered a massive disruption of the comet's fragile icy core when it passed close too the Sun last week. It is still bright enough to see through small telescopes so even amateur astronomers can watch the comet as it dissolves. A comet breaking up is very rare, as we saw with Shoemaker-Levy 9 before it slammed into Jupiter in 1994.
Innermost coma is elongated and rapidly fading.
Star WR 136 is actually trilling her death aria as she is an extremely rare, short-lived, dying star. When WR 136 was a bloated, red super-giant, she fluffed off some of her bulk forming the beautiful Crescent Nebula 250,000 years ago. In simple terms, this means it would take 16 years traveling at the speed of light just to cross this nebula's width. The entire Crescent Nebula glows because Star WR 136 is blasting it with ultraviolet light. The etheric blue area is really a thin layer of gas.