Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The word comet derives from the Old English cometa from the Latin comēta or comētēs. That, in turn, is a romanization of the Greek κομήτης 'wearing long hair', and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that the term (ἀστὴρ) κομήτης already meant 'long-haired star, comet' in Greek.
The comet at the time was a magnitude 19 object about 4.38 AU (655 million km) from Earth. Further observations indicated it had a diffuse coma about 4.5 arcseconds across and a straight tail. [ 1 ] At the time of discovery, it was assumed that this was a new comet from the Oort cloud , and with its very weak absolute magnitude (H=9), there was ...
The comet was fading in May. Closest approach to Earth took place on May 12, 1988, at a distance on 1.22 AU. By the end of May its magnitude was reported to be 7-7.4. [4] By July the comet was very faint and diffuse. It was last observed on 12 August 1988, when it had an apparent magnitude of 12 and its coma was 1.3–1.4 arcminutes across. [4]
Periodic comets (also known as short-period comets) are comets with orbital periods of less than 200 years or that have been observed during more than a single perihelion passage [1] (e.g. 153P/Ikeya–Zhang). "Periodic comet" is also sometimes used to mean any comet with a periodic orbit, even if greater than 200 years.
C/2021 A1 (Leonard) was a long period comet [4] that was discovered by G. J. Leonard at the Mount Lemmon Observatory on 3 January 2021 (a year before perihelion) when the comet was 5 AU (750 million km) from the Sun. [1] It had a retrograde orbit. The nucleus was about 1 km (0.6 miles) across.
"Comet WISE" may also be an incomplete reference to a comet co-discovered by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer satellite. These include: 444P/WISE–PANSTARRS; 453P/WISE–Lemmon; C/2010 FB87 (WISE–Garradd)
Stardust's discovery of crystalline silicates in the dust of comet Wild 2 implies that the dust formed above glass temperature (> 1000 K) in the inner disk region around a hot young star, and was radially mixed in the solar nebula from the inner regions a larger distance from the star or the dust particle condensed in the outflow of evolved red ...
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]