Astronomy Cast 324: Sun Grazers

Comets can spend billions of years out in the Oort Cloud, and then a few brief moments of terror orbiting the Sun. These are the sun grazers. Some survive their journey, and flare up to become the brightest comets in history. Others won’t survive their first, and only encounter with the Sun.

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3 Replies to “Astronomy Cast 324: Sun Grazers”

  1. Does anything in the history of variation in ISON’s brightness and gas/dust balance suggest the kind of complex layering of material suggested by Deep Impact’s analysis of Temple 1?? Have we ever seen a body in the solar system without an impact? Can we get passed “primordial”? And what about space weathering? Supernova’s in the vicinity of the Earth over the last 4 billion years? How primordial can they really be?

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