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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 phenomena are due to the effects of ...
Halley's Comet is the only known short-period comet that is consistently visible to the naked eye from Earth, [16] appearing every 72–80 years, [17] though with the majority of recorded apparations (25 of 30) occuring after 75-77 years. It last appeared in the inner parts of the Solar System in 1986 and will next appear in mid-2061.
Comet Hale–Bopp. Comet Hale–Bopp (formally designated C/1995 O1) is a long-period comet that was one of the most widely observed of the 20th century and one of the brightest seen for many decades. [citation needed] Alan Hale and Thomas Bopp discovered Comet Hale–Bopp separately on July 23, 1995, before it became visible to the naked eye.
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.)
12P/Pons–Brooks is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 71 years. [9] Comets with an orbital period of 20–200 years are referred to as Halley-type comets.It is one of the brightest known periodic comets, reaching an absolute visual magnitude of about 5 in its approach to perihelion. [2]
Lists of comets. Non-periodic comets are seen only once. They are usually on near- parabolic orbits that will not return to the vicinity of the Sun for thousands of years, if ever. 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 ...
Comet Swift–Tuttle (formally designated 109P/Swift–Tuttle) is a large periodic comet with a 1995 (osculating) orbital period of 133 years that is in a 1:11 orbital resonance with Jupiter. It fits the classical definition of a Halley-type comet, which has an orbital period between 20 and 200 years. [4] The comet was independently discovered ...
Comet Hyakutake (formally designated C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake)) is a comet discovered on 31 January 1996. [1] It was dubbed the Great Comet of 1996; its passage to within 0.1 AU (15 Gm) of the Earth on 25 March was one of the closest cometary approaches of the previous 200 years. Reaching an apparent visual magnitude of zero and spanning nearly 80 ...