The
Kreutz sungrazers are a family of
sungrazing comets, characterized by
orbits taking them extremely close to the Sun at
perihelion. They are believed to be fragments of one large
comet that broke up several centuries ago and are named for German
astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who first demonstrated that they were related. A Kreutz sungrazers's
aphelion is about 170
AU from the Sun; these sungrazers make their way from the distant outer Solar System from a patch in the sky in
Canis Major, to the inner Solar System, to their perihelion point near the Sun, and then leave the inner Solar System in their return trip to their aphelion.
Several members of the Kreutz family have become
great comets, occasionally visible near the Sun in the daytime sky. The most recent of these was
Comet Ikeya–Seki in 1965, which may have been one of the brightest comets in the last
millennium. It has been suggested that another cluster of bright Kreutz system comets may begin to arrive in the inner Solar System in the next few years to decades.
More than 4000 of smaller members of the family, some only a few meters across, have been discovered since the launch of the
SOHO satellite in 1995. None of these smaller comets have survived its perihelion passage. Larger sungrazers such as the
Great Comet of 1843 and
C/2011 W3 (Lovejoy) have survived their perihelion passage.
Amateur astronomers have been successful at discovering Kreutz comets in the data available in real time via the internet.
Kreutz sungrazers
