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Posted by baalke on August 10, 2006, 11:27 am
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http://www.esa.int/esaCP/SEMQ0AJZBQE_index_0.html
1000th sungrazing comet discovered by SOHO
European Space Agency
10 August 2006
Polish amateur comet hunter Arkadiusz Kubczak recently discovered his
third comet in SOHO LASCO coronagraph images, but this one was special:
the 1000th SOHO comet discovery in the Kreutz group of sungrazing
comets.
While there is no formal definition of a 'sungrazing comet,' the term
typically refers to the Kreutz-group comets, which have a perihelion
distance of less than 0.01 of an Astronomical Unit (the mean distance
between the Earth and the Sun), or some 1460000 km.
The 1185th comet discovered in data from the SOHO LASCO or SWAN
instruments (the other 185 are not members of the Kreutz group), the
faint object is officially designated C/2006 P7 (SOHO) by the Minor
Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union.
Before the launch of SOHO in 1995 December, only some thirty members of
the Kreutz group were known. All 1000 Kreutz comets are believed to be
fragments of a single comet observed in c. 371 BCE by Aristotle and
Ephorus, and the fragments themselves continue to fragment, making more
sungrazing comets.
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