They split again and again, producing the sungrazer family, all still coming from the same direction. Their ancestor must have been enormous by cometary standards. We've increased the number of known sungrazing comets by a factor of four. This implies that there could be as many as 20,000 fragments. The comet's original single nucleus was torn to pieces by Jupiter's strong gravity during a close encounter with the solar system's largest planet in 1992.
Life is perilous for a sungrazer.
The mixture of ice and dust that makes up a comet's nucleus is heated like the proverbial snowball in hell, and it can survive its visit to the Sun only if it is quite large. What's more, the strong tidal effect of the Sun's gravity can tear the loosely glued nucleus apart. The disruption that created the many SOHO sungrazers was similar to the fate of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9, which went too close to Jupiter and broke up into many pieces that eventually fell into the massive planet in 1994. The history of splitting gives clues to the strength of comets, which will be of practical importance if ever a comet seems likely to hit the Earth. Also, the fragments seen as SOHO comets reveal the internal composition of comets, freshly exposed, in contrast to the much-altered surfaces of objects like Halley's Comet that have visited the Sun many times.