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This comet was also found to be made from a cold space cloud, which is why it is made of dust and ice loosely compacted. [61] To investigate the nucleus of the comet, the Rosetta spacecraft passed radio waves through the comet. [61] This experiment showed that the head of the comet was very porous. [61]
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.
Comet orbits had been determined quite precisely, yet comets were at times recovered "off-schedule," by as much as days. Early comets could be explained by a "resisting medium"—such as "the aether", or the cumulative action of meteoroids against the front of the comet(s). [citation needed] But comets could return both early and late. Whipple ...
Astronomers posed over the past decade that dark comets, or objects that resemble asteroids but move like comets, may exist. Now, scientists have found a total of 14 of them.
As space objects go, comets and meteors are not very big. While a planet like Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter and a star like our Sun is about 865,000 miles across, the largest asteroid ...
An image shows the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in March 2015. New research from NASA says Jupiter-family comets like this one could have been potential sources of water for early Earth ...
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 approach of Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS has particularly excited astronomers because it is a long-period comet, meaning the comet takes more than 200 years — or 80,000 years in this case ...