Kreutz sungrazer

The Kreutz sungrazers are a family of comets that pass extremely close to the Sun. They are thought to be fragments of a larger comet that broke apart centuries ago.

Sungrazing comet: A comet whose orbit carries it extremely close to the Sun. Kreutz comets are the best-known family within this broader class.
Aristotle's Comet: A bright comet reported by Aristotle and other ancient writers in 371 BCE. Some reconstructions identify it as the ancient parent of the Kreutz family.
SOHO: A space observatory operated by ESA and NASA to study the Sun and its environment. Its coronagraph images have discovered thousands of faint Kreutz comets.
Non-periodic comet: A comet whose orbit has a period so long that it is not observed returning on human timescales. Most Kreutz comets are not expected to return in a predictable short cycle.
Comet nucleus: The solid central body of a comet, made mainly of ice, dust, and rocky material. A small nucleus must survive intense heating and tidal forces near the Sun.
Fragmentation of comets: The splitting of a cometary body into two or more pieces. Repeated breakups are the proposed process that produced the Kreutz family.
Solar and Heliospheric Observatory coronagraphs: Instruments that block the Sun's bright disk to image its surrounding corona. They reveal sungrazers that would otherwise be lost in the solar glare.
Periodic comet: A comet that returns to the inner Solar System on a recurring orbital period. The well-known short-period comets contrast with the long, near-solar Kreutz trajectories.
Tidal disruption: The breakup of an object under differences in gravitational force across its body. Solar tides can fracture a sungrazer as it approaches perihelion.
Heinrich Kreutz: A German astronomer who established the orbital relationship among several great sungrazing comets. His nineteenth-century analysis gave the family its name.

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