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Little is known of what people thought about comets before Aristotle, who observed his eponymous comet, and most of what is known comes secondhand.From cuneiform astronomical tablets, and works by Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Seneca, and one attributed to Plutarch but now thought to be Aetius, it is observed that ancient philosophers divided themselves into two main camps.
A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing.This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or coma surrounding the nucleus, and sometimes a tail of gas and dust gas blown out from the coma.
These comets come from the Kuiper belt and scattered disk, beyond the orbit of Pluto, with possible origins in the Oort cloud for many. For comets with an orbital period of over 1000 years (semi-major axis greater than ~100 AU), see the List of near-parabolic comets.
Periodic comets usually have elongated elliptical orbits, and usually return to the vicinity of the Sun after a number of decades. The official names of non-periodic comets begin with a "C"; the names of periodic comets begin with "P" or a number followed by "P". Comets that have been lost or disappeared have names with a "D". Comets whose ...
The Southern Comet of 1947 (also known with the designations C/1947 X1, 1947 XII, and 1947n) was a bright comet that became visible in the southern hemisphere in December 1947. At that point, it was the brightest comet seen in two decades [ 5 ] and is one of the brightest comets seen since 1935, with an estimated maximum apparent magnitude of -3.
Advances were made in understanding sungrazing comets in the 19th century with the Great Comets of 1843, C/1880 C1, and 1882.C/1880 C1 and C/1843 D1 had very similar appearances and also resembled the Great Comet of 1106, therefore Daniel Kirkwood proposed that C/1880 C1 and C/1843 D1 were separate fragments of the same object. [1]
The most successful visual comet discoverer of all time was Jean-Louis Pons, who claimed to have discovered thirty-seven; the second most prolific was William Robert Brooks. The first woman known to have discovered comets was Caroline Herschel. The first telescopic discovery of a comet was made by Gottfried Kirch in 1680.
Comet Encke / ˈ ɛ ŋ k i /, or Encke's Comet (official designation: 2P/Encke), is a periodic comet that completes an orbit of the Sun once every 3.3 years. (This is the shortest period of a reasonably bright comet; the faint main-belt comet 311P/PanSTARRS has a period of 3.2 years.)