She was surprised in her suicidal race to the Sun, the first comet discovered in 2020. The Soho (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory), identified by the NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), identified it and is a special type of a comet called 'sungrazer', whose characteristic is it passes grazing the Sun.
It belongs to the family of Kreutz grazing comets, whose orbits from the orbits extremely close to the Sun, composed of the debris of a single large comet that fragmented many centuries ago. They are named after the German astronomer Heinrich Kreutz, who first demonstrated their common origin in the late 1800s.
Hundreds of Kreutz fragments pass near the Sun and disintegrate every year, so much so that the Soho observatory has so far reached a real record of observations, with 3,900 comets discovered so far. Launched in 1995 to observe the Sun, the telescope unexpectedly proved to be a formidable comet hunter. Such an activity that had not been planned at all, but turned out to be an unexpected success.
However, user contribution was fundamental in this, because about 95% of the comets intercepted by Soho were discovered by citizens, who made their home PCs available for research, analyzing the images of the space observatory published online almost in real time.
