{"id":22408,"date":"2024-04-12T02:58:02","date_gmt":"2024-04-11T21:28:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=22408"},"modified":"2025-10-11T11:38:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-11T06:08:54","slug":"sungrazing-comets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/sungrazing-comets\/","title":{"rendered":"What are Sungrazing Comets?"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>About Sungrazing Comets<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Sungrazing comets are a special class of <strong>comets that come very close to the sun<\/strong> at their <strong>nearest approach<\/strong>, a point <strong>called perihelion<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li>To be considered a sungrazer, a comet <strong>needs to get within<\/strong> about <strong>850,000 miles from the sun<\/strong> at perihelion.\u00a0<\/li>\n<li><strong>Many come even closer<\/strong>, even to within a few thousand miles.<\/li>\n<li>Being so close to the sun is <strong>very hard on comets<\/strong> for many reasons.\u00a0\n<ul>\n<li>They are subjected to a lot of <strong>solar radiation,<\/strong> which <strong>boils off their water or<\/strong> other<strong> volatiles.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>The <strong>physical push of<\/strong> the <strong>radiation and<\/strong> the <strong>solar wind<\/strong> also <strong>helps form the tails.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>As they get closer to the sun, the comets experience extremely <strong>strong tidal forces<\/strong>, or gravitational stress.<\/li>\n<li>In this hostile environment<strong>, many sungrazers do not survive<\/strong> their trip around the sun.<\/li>\n<li>Although <strong>they don&#8217;t actually crash<\/strong> into the <strong>solar surface<\/strong>, the <strong>sun is able to destroy them<\/strong>.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Most usually evaporate<\/strong> in the hot solar atmosphere.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Orbit<\/strong>: Most of the sungrazing comets observed follow a similar orbit, called the <strong>Kreutz Path,<\/strong> a single orbit that takes <strong>800 years to complete.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>They collectively belong to a population called the <strong>Kreutz Group.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>These Kreutz comets <strong>are fragments from a single large comet<\/strong> that was shattered thousands of years ago.<\/li>\n<li>The far end of the Kreutz path lies 160 times farther from the sun than the orbit of Earth.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>What is a Comet?<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Comets are <strong>frozen leftovers from<\/strong> the <strong>formation of the solar system,<\/strong> composed of <strong>dust, rock, and ice.<\/strong><\/li>\n<li>They <strong>orbit the sun in highly elliptical orbits<\/strong> that can take hundreds of thousands of years to complete.<\/li>\n<li>They range from a <strong>few miles to tens of miles wide<\/strong>, but as they orbit closer to the Sun, they <strong>heat up and spew gases and dust into a glowing head<\/strong> that can be larger than a planet.<\/li>\n<li>The dust and gases <strong>form a tail<\/strong> that stretches away from the Sun for millions of miles.\u00a0<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\u00b7 According to NASA, as of January 2023, the current number of known comets is 3,743. Though <strong>billions<\/strong> more are <strong>thought to be orbiting the sun<\/strong> beyond Neptune <strong>in the Kuiper Belt <\/strong>and the distant Oort cloud far beyond Pluto.<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3>Q1: What is a total solar eclipse?<\/h3>\n<p>A total solar eclipse is a condition when the Moon passes between the Sun and the Earth and completely blocks the Sun&#8217;s disk, casting a huge shadow on the surface. People viewing the eclipse from locations where the Moon\u2019s shadow completely covers the Sun\u2013known as the path of totality\u2013will experience a total solar eclipse. As per NASA, during this timeframe, the sky will darken, resembling the onset of dawn or dusk.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Source: <\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/www.livescience.com\/space\/the-sun\/tiny-sungrazer-comet-discovered-photographed-and-destroyed-all-during-historic-total-solar-eclipse\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\"><u>Total solar eclipse reveals tiny new comet moments before it was destroyed by the sun<\/u><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sungrazing comets are a special class of comets that come very close to the sun at their nearest approach, a point called perihelion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":22409,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22408","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-prelims-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22408\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22409"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}