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D/1770 L1, popularly known as Lexell's Comet after its orbit computer Anders Johan Lexell, was a comet discovered by astronomer Charles Messier in June 1770. [note 1] It is notable for having passed closer to Earth than any other comet in recorded history, approaching to a distance of only 0.015 astronomical units (2,200,000 km; 1,400,000 mi), [1] [8] [9] or six times the distance from the ...
One particularly distant body is 90377 Sedna, which was discovered in November 2003.It has an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it to an aphelion of 937 AU. [2] It takes over 10,000 years to orbit, and during the next 50 years it will slowly move closer to the Sun as it comes to perihelion at a distance of 76 AU from the Sun. [3] Sedna is the largest known sednoid, a class of objects that ...
Its diameter is eleven times that of Earth, and a tenth that of the Sun. Jupiter orbits the Sun at a distance of 5.20 AU (778.5 Gm), with an orbital period of 11.86 years. It is the third-brightest natural object in the Earth's night sky , after the Moon and Venus , and has been observed since prehistoric times .
[1] [2] The low eccentricity and comparatively small size of its orbit give Venus the least range in distance between perihelion and aphelion of the planets: 1.46 million km. The planet orbits the Sun once every 225 days [ 3 ] and travels 4.54 au (679,000,000 km; 422,000,000 mi) in doing so, [ 4 ] giving an average orbital speed of 35 km/s ...
This diagram shows various possible elongations (ε), each of which is the angular distance between a planet and the Sun from Earth's perspective. In astronomy, a planet's elongation is the angular separation between the Sun and the planet, with Earth as the reference point. [1] The greatest elongation is the maximum angular separation.
The apsides refer to the farthest (2) and nearest (3) points reached by an orbiting planetary body (2 and 3) with respect to a primary, or host, body (1). An apsis (from Ancient Greek ἁψίς (hapsís) 'arch, vault'; pl. apsides / ˈ æ p s ɪ ˌ d iː z / AP-sih-deez) [1] [2] is the farthest or nearest point in the orbit of a planetary body about its primary body.
Some of these TNOs with an extreme aphelion are detached objects such as 2010 GB 174, which always reside in the outermost region of the Solar System, while for other TNOs, the extreme aphelion is due to an exceptionally high eccentricity such as for 2005 VX 3, which orbits the Sun at a distance between 4.1 (closer than Jupiter) and 2200 AU (70 ...
ꞌAylóꞌchaxnim is the only asteroid known to have an orbit completely within Venus's orbit. With an aphelion distance of approximately 0.654 astronomical units (AU), [3] it has the smallest known aphelion of all asteroids. In comparison, Venus's average orbital distance from the Sun is 0.723 AU, with a perihelion distance of 0.718 AU.