Kreutz sungrazers

a family of comets that dive through the Sun's corona · replayed

0.97 AU from Earth

Pieces of one giant comet that broke up centuries ago, still on nearly the same orbit, which skims the Sun's corona as close as about 130,000 km above its surface. The SOHO spacecraft has found over 4,000 of them; most are only a few metres to tens of metres across and boil away.

• a replay, 15,000 times faster than real · perihelion 1.2 Sun radii from its centre
• closest to the Sun they move at over 500 km/s
• famous members: the Great Comets of 1843 and 1882, Ikeya-Seki (1965), Lovejoy (2011)

Numbers that change with time are from 8 November 2026.

kind

comet or meteor shower

distance

0.037 AU from the Sun

orbits

the Sun