Many objects have reached much closer than Mercury, including asteroids, comets and spacecraft, experts told Live Science.
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Another group of celestial objects, though, may beat 2024 YL3. These are proposed asteroids that are thought to have circular orbits within Mercury's path. Dubbed Vulcanoids, their name comes from Vulcan, a theoretical planet once hypothesized to exist in this region.
A rendering of the Mercury-crossing asteroid Icarus. Over longer timescales, such asteroids also turn out as "winners." Sheppard said that because they are dynamically unstable, they will likely collide with the sun within a few million years, although they may instead crash into a planet or be ejected. (Image credit: By NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSSR)But some spacecraft have come much, much closer. For instance, NASA's Parker Solar Probe, which launched in 2018, studied the sun's outer atmosphere, or corona. For the primary mission's final three orbits, the probe took an eccentric path with a perihelion of merely 4.5 million miles (7.3 million km) from the sun's center. At this distance, illustrated graphically on the mission's official webpage, the spacecraft flew through the corona, where a carbon foam shield protected the probe from the extreme heat.
"Sungrazers" and "sun-diving" comets
Sungrazing comets often become spectacularly bright as they approach perihelion. (Image credit: Roger Lynds/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/)Man-To Hui, a researcher at the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory, told Live Science that small sungrazers — some of which are just 30 feet (10 m) wide —break up as they rotate because they get nonuniformly heated, while the sun's powerful gravity pulls apart larger ones. Nonetheless, several escape unscathed; one of the closest observed so far was the Great Southern Comet of 1887, which came within an incredible 446,187 miles (718,070 km) from the sun.
Related mysteriesBut the real "winners" are "sundiving," or "sunstriking," comets. Such comets likely abounded in the early solar system, although they're thought to be rare nowadays. These comets would cross the sun's visible surface, or photosphere, plunging into the sun. Although no one has detected such a sundiver yet, the 2018 study noted that a comet would need a perihelion less than the sun's radius, or 432,244 miles (695,630 km) from the sun's center. There are no second passes, though — all sundiving comets are destroyed within the sun.
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