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Comets whose aphelia are near a major planet's orbit are called its "family". [81] Such families are thought to arise from the planet capturing formerly long-period comets into shorter orbits. [82] At the shorter orbital period extreme, Encke's Comet has an orbit that does not reach the orbit of Jupiter, and is known as an Encke-type comet.
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.
Astronomers have been discovering weakly hyperbolic comets that were perturbed out of the Oort Cloud since the mid-1800s. Prior to finding a well-determined orbit for comets, the JPL Small-Body Database and the Minor Planet Center list comet orbits as having an assumed eccentricity of 1.0. (This is the eccentricity of a parabolic trajectory ...
In nearly all cases, comets are named after their discoverers, but in a few cases such as 2P/Encke and 27P/Crommelin they were named for a person who calculated their orbits (the orbit computers). The long-term orbits of comets can be difficult to calculate due to errors in the known trajectory that can accumulate from perturbations from the ...
Halley's Comet is one of the most well-known comets, which orbits the sun about once every 76 years. However, most comets take thousands of years to complete one orbit around the sun, such as ...
This is a list of comets (bodies that travel in elliptical, parabolic, and sometimes hyperbolic orbits and display a tail behind them) listed by type. Comets are sorted into four categories: periodic comets (e.g. Halley's Comet), non-periodic comets (e.g. Comet Hale–Bopp), comets with no meaningful orbit (the Great Comet of 1106), and lost comets (), displayed as either P (periodic), C (non ...
Due to having the most eccentric orbits of any Solar System body, a comet's orbit typically intersects one or more of the planets in the Solar System. As a result, the orbit of a comet is frequently perturbed significantly, even over the course of a single pass through the inner Solar System. Due to the changing orbit, it's necessary to provide ...
An artist's concept of a planetary system. A planetary system is a set of gravitationally bound non-stellar bodies in or out of orbit around a star or star system.Generally speaking, systems with one or more planets constitute a planetary system, although such systems may also consist of bodies such as dwarf planets, asteroids, natural satellites, meteoroids, comets, planetesimals [1] [2] and ...