C/1945 X1 (du Toit)
comet
Comet du Toit, formal designation C/1945 X1, is a sungrazing comet that was observed four times by South African astronomer, Daniel du Toit, in December 1945. The comet is a member of the Kreutz sungrazer family. It passed about 400,000 km (250,000 mi) from the surface of the Sun.
Discovery and observations
The comet was discovered by Daniel du Toit from the Harvard College Observatory of Bloemfontein, South Africa shortly after midnight on 11 December 1945, where he estimated its brightness as a 7th-magnitude object. He only managed to make four observations of the comet in the following nights, during which the comet rapidly moved towards the Sun. At the beginning of January 1946, Leland E. Cunningham calculated a preliminary orbit from du Toit's observation data, and concluded that the comet may have reached perihelion by 27–28 December 1945 which should have been a "brilliant object in the naked eye". However, a subsequent search on coronagraph images showed no signs of the comet, even at positions predicted by Cunningham.
It is not certain whether or not the comet fully disintegrated during perihelion or it survived but simply remained unobserved.
Orbit
It has a very short observation arc of 4 days based on 4 observations and an assumed eccentricity of 1.0. In 1967, Brian G. Marsden initially determined several possible parabolic orbits of comets (including du Toit) that were similar to that of C/1882 R1 and C/1965 S1 (Ikeya–Seki).
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This entry incorporates text from “C/1945 X1 (du Toit)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.