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Little is known of what people thought about comets before Aristotle, who observed his eponymous comet, and most of what is known comes secondhand.From cuneiform astronomical tablets, and works by Aristotle, Diodorus Siculus, Seneca, and one attributed to Plutarch but now thought to be Aetius, it is observed that ancient philosophers divided themselves into two main camps.
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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 ...
Due to the massive size of its nucleus, Comet Hale–Bopp was observed intensively by astronomers during its perihelion passage, and several important advances in cometary science resulted from these observations. The dust production rate of the comet was very high (up to 2.0 × 10 6 kg/s), [37] which may have made the inner coma optically ...
Obscure Comet Brightens Suddenly; Quick Facts About Comet Holmes; Simple Instructions on How to Find Comet Holmes Instructions for the Amateur-based around Toronto or New York. 17P at Las Cumbres Observatory (22 Jan 2010 11:57, 223 seconds) Hubble Zooms In on Heart of Mystery Comet (Hubblesite STScI-2007-40 : November 1, 2007)