Sungrazer Comet

[Waspie_Dwarf]

NASA/ESA SOHO - Sungrazer Comet

And here is a short video from what NASA/ESA's SOHO coronagraph LASCO C3 has seen. The estimate is that the comet (Kreutz Sungrazers) will reach the Sun sometime tomorrow.

The comet comes in from about the 4 o'clock position. Can't see it? Look at this post to find it:

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.

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.

Many hundreds 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 has 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.

Credit: NASA/ESA SOHO

Source: NASA/SDO - Facebook

[kannin]

oh wow this is really cool, learnt a bit from this thanx waspie