On the Existence of a Super-Kreutz System of Sungrazing Comets

TL;DR

This paper proposes the concept of a super-Kreutz system encompassing all related sungrazers from a common progenitor, and explores their fragmentation history and relationships to better understand the Kreutz system's formation.

Contribution

It introduces the idea of a super-Kreutz system, extending the Kreutz system to include all related objects from a shared parent, and models their fragmentation history.

Findings

Estimated ratio of super-Kreutz members to nonmembers.

Generated pedigree charts illustrating relationships among sungrazers.

Suggested that the Kreutz system is an end-stage of the super-Kreutz system.

Abstract

In the context of a recently proposed contact-binary model of the Kreutz system, all its members are products of the process of cascading fragmentation of the two lobes of the parent, Aristotle's comet of 372 BC. This process presumably began with the lobes' separation from each other near aphelion. However, not every object in a Kreutz-like orbit is a Kreutz sungrazer. Any surviving sungrazer that had split off from the progenitor before the lobes separated, as well as its surviving fragments born in any subsequent tidal or nontidal event, are by definition not members of the Kreutz system. Yet, as parts of the same progenitor, they belong -- as do all Kreutz sungrazers -- to a broader assemblage of related objects, which I refer to as a super-Kreutz system. After estimating the ratio of the number of super-Kreutz members to nonmembers among potential historical sungrazers, I generate representative extended pedigree charts for both the Kreutz system and super-Kreutz system. While the fragmentation paths and relationships among the individual sungrazers or potential sungrazers in the two charts are (with at most a few exceptions) arbitrary, the purpose of the exercise is to suggest that the Kreutz system proper could in effect represent an ultimate deagglomeration stage of the super-Kreutz system.