Speaker
Description
The passage of the Kreutz-family comey C/2026 A1 MAPS at a distance of less than 0.2 solar radii from the Sun on April 4 has drawn a lot of attention to its possible fate. That is, whether it will survive the perihelion passage like comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965 or it will be broken up into many fragments like the case of comet ISON in 2013 will be closely watched. We would like to take this opportunity to carry out a first-order model calculation to examine the thermal evolution of this class of sun-grazing comets as they approach the perihelion - and move away if the nuclei remain intact. It is interesting to show that because of the increasingly strong back pressure of the sublimating gas as the solar distance decreases, the subsurface interior of a near-sun comet could be compressed to form a rigid crust. This might be a possible reason why comet Ikeya-Seki (and hopefully comet MAPS also) can shine again after going around the Sun.
| Participate the oral/poster presentation award competition | Yes |
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