Portal:Astronomy/Featured/May 2005

The Kreutz Sungrazers are a family of comets, characterized by orbits which take them extremely close to the Sun at perihelion. They are all believed to originate from the fragmentation of one very large comet several centuries ago, and are named for the astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who first demonstrated that they were related.

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.

Many hundreds of smaller members of the family have been discovered since the launch of the SOHO satellite in 1995. Some are just a few metres across; none has survived its perihelion passage. Amateur astronomers have been very successful at discovering Kreutz comets in the data available in real time via the Internet.

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