Nov 29, 2013 02:59 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

If Comet ISON survived its encounter with the sun, it did not do so by much and appears to down to its final fragment, although some scientists are not sure, BBC News reported.

Watching intently Thursday during its scheduled flyby of the sun, scientists declared the comet dead because they did not see it emerge after disappearing behind our star. Hours later, however, images emerged that could depict what might be a small fragment of the bewildering Comet ISON.

"We've been following this comet for a year now and all the way it has been surprising us and confusing us," said astrophysicist Karl Battams, who works with the NASA-funded Sungrazing Comets Project. "It's just typical that right at the end, when we said, 'yes, it has faded out, it's died, we've lost it in the Sun', that a couple of hours later it should pop right back up again."

CLICK HERE to WATCH ISON pass behind the sun and emerge on the other side.

The small shred of ISON's could very well fizzle out before the weekend even begins, but the evidence suggests it is actually getting brighter. That would also explain why the astronomers would have missed it and spotted it later.

Experts with the European Space Agency reportedly had the same reaction as NASA, declaring ISON dead and reevaluating it a short while later. Still, it is impossible to determine how much of the original two-km-wide space rock of ice and dust remains. With the comet already withering away, a close encounter to the sun's intense heat and gravity would have shredded ISON. Many experts were not expecting it survive at all.

ISON was billed at one point as "the Comet of the Century," so the experts who have been following for the past year are going to take their time to reassess its state.

"We would like people to give us a couple of days, just to look at more images as they come from the spacecraft, and that will allow us to assess the brightness of the object that we're seeing now, and how that brightness changes," Battams told BBC News. "That will give us an idea of maybe what the object is composed of and what it might do in the coming days and weeks."

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