The Kreutz sungrazers are a group of comets descended from the breakup of a comet in about 371 BC. They are typically traveling less than 2 solar radii from the Sun. Because they travel so close, they often burn up. Many bright comets are members of the group, including Comet IkeyaâÂÂSeki, which broke in 3 pieces in its 1965 perihelion. The Kreutz sungrazers can be subdivided into several groups- a primary group at inclination ~144ð and node ~5, and a secondary, smaller group at inclination ~139ð node ~350ð. The entire group spans several degrees across in their orbits, and make up a significant portion of the known comets in the Solar System â as of November 2015, about 3000 of the 4000 known comets belong to the Kreutz sungrazers group. Many of these short arc comets are assumed to have an orbital eccentricity of 1.0 because their long-term orbits are poorly constrained.
Kreutz comets discovered through the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) also have their numerical designations included in the list, whether or not they received official designations from the Minor Planet Center. Members that have been observed from the ground and those bright enough to be considered as great comets were also color coded, to further distinguish them from smaller ones only observed by satellites in space.
Most of the comets listed here were potential members of the Kreutz family that were identified by Ichiro Hasegawa and Katherine Jane England, respectively. Comet names starting with X/ indicate a comet for which no reliable orbit is known.
Since 1996, the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) had discovered more comets than anyone in history, of which 86% of the approximately 3,100 comets it had discovered (as of 2016) belong to the Kreutz sungrazer family.
Since May 2008, the Small-Body Database of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory no longer list any Kreutz comets discovered through SOHO to its catalog, although the Minor Planet Center continued to assign official designations to them. The last SOHO Kreutz comet listed on JPL-SBDB was C/2008 J16 (SOHO).
From 2011 onwards, most SOHO comets have not received an official designation from the Minor Planet Center. Exceptions include notable comets like C/2020 X3 (SOHO), which appeared during the total solar eclipse on 14 December 2020.
Since February 2025, new members of the Kreutz family are also being discovered through the Compact Coronagraph (CCOR) instrument aboard the GOES-19 satellite.