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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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
The aphelion can change significantly due to the gravitational influence of planets and other stars. Most of these objects are comets on a calculated path and may not be directly observable. [1] For instance, comet Hale-Bopp was last seen in 2013 at magnitude 24 [2] and continues to fade, making it invisible to all but the most powerful telescopes.
The Devil Comet has a good chance of being the most visible on Sunday, April 21. This is when the comet will reach its perihelion: the closest point to the sun on its orbital path.
Most sungrazing comets are part of the Kreutz family. [8] The group generally has an eccentricity approaching 1, [9] orbital inclination of 139–144° (precluding close encounters with planets), [10] a perihelion distance of less than 0.01 AU (less than the diameter of the Sun [11]), an aphelion distance of about 100 AU [12] and an orbital period of about 500–1,000 years. [4]