Newly Discovered Sungrazing Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) Could be the Brightest of the Year

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Or it might just be destroyed by the Sun. It's a tough call:

It's been a while since we've had a Great Comet in the sky, something bright and visible for many. Currently, no object appears to fit the bill for 2026, but a couple of comets have a chance to become bright enough to be visible to the naked eye this April. In fact, a newly discovered Kreutz sungrazer has a very good chance of doing that.

The object is known as C/2026 A1 (MAPS), discovered extremely recently on January 20 by a group of French amateur astronomers using the AMACS1 Observatory in the Atacama Desert, Chile. It has been traced back to the Kreutz comet group, a group that has some of the brightest comets ever seen, like the Great Comet of 1843.

Like other members of this group, it comes from below the plane of the Solar System. It will have its perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun, on April 4. At perihelion, the comet will be just 810,000 kilometers (about 500,000 miles) from our star. In comparison, interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS's perihelion in October 2025 saw it fly around 200 million kilometers (124 million miles) from the Sun.

Sungrazing comets can become very bright for quite a while, or very bright for a very short time, or just get ripped apart. We'll have to wait and see. It is already a record-breaker, however. No inbound Kreutz comet has ever been spotted so far from the Sun with such a long lead-in time (11.5 weeks) before reaching perihelion.

"It's moving on an orbit typical of Kreutz sungrazing comets, and already holds one record. At the time of its discovery, comet MAPS was farther from the Sun than any previous newly discovered sungrazer," Jonti Horner wrote in The Conversation. "That suggests it might be a larger-than-usual fragment-perhaps."

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