SOHO Coronagraph Captures Sungrazer Comet Disintegrating Near the Sun
Summary: On April 4, 2026, Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS), a Kreutz sungrazing comet, disintegrated during its approach to the Sun. The coronagraph on the NASA/ESA SOHO spacecraft captured the comet approaching intact before it vanished behind the solar disk, only to reappear as a cloud of dust hours later.
Credit: NASA / ESA (Public Domain)
Observation Record
On April 4, 2026, Comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS) plunged toward the Sun—flying about twice as far from our star as the Moon is from Earth. The coronagraph instrument on SOHO, which blocks out the Sun with a disk to reveal relatively faint features and objects, showed the comet approaching the Sun seemingly intact before it disappeared behind the coronagraph's disk.
However, a few hours later, SOHO saw nothing but a cloud of dust come out from the other side of the disk. The comet had disintegrated.
"The comet was clearly destroyed—likely several hours before its closest approach to the Sun," said Karl Battams of the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the principal investigator for SOHO's coronagraph, called LASCO (Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph).
Discovery and Origin
Comet MAPS was discovered on January 13, 2026, by a telescope in Chile belonging to the MAPS program led by amateur astronomers Alain Maury, Georges Attard, Daniel Parrott, and Florian Signoret. It belonged to a family of comets called Kreutz sungrazing comets, which all have similar orbits that take them very close to the Sun and are thought to be pieces of a larger comet that broke apart centuries ago.
Credit: NASA / ESA (Public Domain)
Sources (original pages)
Translated from NASA Science news, published April 16, 2026.