New Bright Sungrazing Comet

A new bright comet (designated SOHO-1932) diving into the Sun has been discovered on Oct. 19th by Bo Zhou using the images taken by SOHO spacecraft. This object belong to the famous Kreutz-group comet, a family of sungrazing comets that are named after German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz who first studied them in the details. These comet fragments passes extremely close to the Sun at perihelion and usually they completely evaporated during such a close approach.

Several sungrazing comets are discovered each year in SOHO images, many of them are very small and faint while sometimes some bigger and bright fragments arrive in the proximity of the Sun.

SOHO-1932

(Credit : SOHO)

SOHO-1932 in C2 (long, thin tail is well over a million-km long in this image)

(Credit : SOHO)

Animation of SOHO-1932 (click on the thumbnail for a bigger version)

(Credit : SOHO & Spaceweather)

You can read more details about other recently 2010 bright SOHO comets here:

http://remanzacco.blogspot.com/2010/04/new-bright-sungrazing-comet.html

http://remanzacco.blogspot.com/2010/01/bright-sungrazing-comet.html

http://remanzacco.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-sungrazing-comet.html

http://remanzacco.blogspot.com/2010/03/new-sungrazing-comet.html

by Ernesto Guido