A Review of Historical Naked-Eye Sungrazing Comets
Abstract
With the upcoming perihelion passage of Comet ISON (C/2012 S1) in November 2013, there is considerable interest in sungrazing comets at present. However, given the infrequency with which such comets appear, there have been few systematic studies of their behavior near perihelion. Bright, sometimes even daytime-observable comets have been recorded by observers around the world for more than 2000 years. A number of authors have compiled records of possible historical sungrazing comets, e.g., Hasegawa 1979, Kronk 1999, Hasegawa & Nakano 2001, England 2002, and Strom 2002. We review this literature to estimate the frequency of arrival of naked-eye sungrazing comets and investigate if there are any trends in their behavior, such as between peak brightness and length of time a comet is observable. We will also review the “modern” observations of naked-eye sungrazing comets (primarily Kreutz group comets observed since 1800) to investigate the frequency of fragmentation near the Sun and the dependence of survivability on size (as inferred from brightness) and/or perihelion distance.
- Publication:
-
AAS/Division for Planetary Sciences Meeting Abstracts #45
- Pub Date:
- October 2013
- Bibcode:
- 2013DPS....4511601K