Bright Sungrazing Comet on October 01, 2011

A new bright comet diving into the Sun is visible right now (October 01, 2011) in C3 and C2 images taken by SOHO spacecraft. This object belong to the famous Kreutz-group, 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. The comet (designated SOHO-2143) was discovered on Sept. 29th by a group of four independent SOHO comet hunters (M. Kusiak, S. Liwo, B. Zhou and Z. Xu), who reported it within 9-secs of each other!

According to Karl Battams: "It's *very* rare for a comet to enter the fov as bright as this one. I think this is the brightest SOHO Kreutz we've ever seen!"

SOHO-2143 is strongly saturating C3 Images - (click to see a bigger version)