TWO #COMETS DIVE INTO THE #SUN: Over the weekend, the sun swallowed a comet. Correction: Make that two. Karl Battams of the US Naval Research Lab took a closer look at SOHO coronagraph images, and this is what he found:

"Saturday's bright comet turned out to have a smaller, leading companion," says Battams. "This isn't particularly uncommon. I'd estimate that at least 30% of the really bright sungrazers we see in SOHO coronagraph images end up having a small leading or trailing companion."

Both comets in Battams' movie are Kreutz sungrazers. These are fragments from the breakup of a single giant comet many centuries ago. Since SOHO was launched in 1995, the observatory has watched more than 4000 Kreutz fragments fall into the sun. None have survived.

Astronomers have long wondered if one day a whole cluster of Kreutz fragments might appear--a veritable squadron of comets dive-bombing the sun. Such a swarm could be concentrated around the location of the progenitor comet. However, no one knows if or when it would happen.

"We have absolutely no idea what the actual distribution of Kreutz comets looks like around their orbit," notes Battams. "Undoubtedly there are clusters, but it’s a several-century long path they're following and we've only been blessed with a ~25-yr window into that.

spaceweather.com