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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.
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 ...
[181] [182] Rocky material represents asteroids and porous material represents comets. Cometary material is porous from nucleus size to micron sized fractal dust it emits. [183] [184] The collisional lifetime of a dust particle in interplanetary space can be determined where the flux of interplanetary dust is known.
In an attempt to link the 1843 and 1880 comets to the comet in 1106 and 371 BC, Kreutz measured the fragments of the 1882 comet and determined that it was likely a fragment of the 1106 comet. He then designated that all sungrazing comets with similar orbital characteristics as these few comets would be part of the Kreutz Group .
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.
^ Radii for plutoid candidates taken from material published by John A. Stansberry et al. [39] ^ Axial tilts for most satellites assumed to be zero in accordance with the Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac: "In the absence of other information, the axis of rotation is assumed to be normal to the mean orbital plane."
The heliospheric current sheet results from the influence of the Sun's rotating magnetic field on the plasma in the interplanetary medium. [1]The interplanetary medium (IPM) or interplanetary space consists of the mass and energy which fills the Solar System, and through which all the larger Solar System bodies, such as planets, dwarf planets, asteroids, and comets, move.
In comet nomenclature, the letter before the "/" is either "C" (a non-periodic comet), "P" (a periodic comet), "D" (a comet that has been lost or has disintegrated), "X" (a comet for which no reliable orbit could be calculated —usually historical comets), "I" for an interstellar object, or "A" for an object that was either mistakenly ...