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The coma is the nebulous envelope around the nucleus of a comet, formed when the comet passes near the Sun in its highly elliptical orbit. As the comet warms, parts of it sublimate ; [ 1 ] this gives a comet a diffuse appearance when viewed through telescopes and distinguishes it from stars .
While the solid nucleus of comets is generally less than 30 km across, the coma may be larger than the Sun, and ion tails have been observed to extend 3.8 astronomical units (570 Gm; 350 × 10 ^ 6 mi). [6] The Ulysses spacecraft made an unexpected pass through the tail of the comet C/2006 P1 (Comet McNaught), on February 3, 2007. [7]
The comet upon discovery was located in the constellation Cassiopeia and Schmidt described the comet as being tailless, with a coma 22 arcminutes across, and visible with the naked eye. Temple estimated its magnitude to be 4–5. Schmidt observed the comet again on July 4 and noted a tail half a degree long. [2]
The nucleus of Comet Tempel 1. The nucleus is the solid, central part of a comet, formerly termed a dirty snowball or an icy dirtball. A cometary nucleus is composed of rock, dust, and frozen gases. When heated by the Sun, the gases sublime and produce an atmosphere surrounding the nucleus known as the coma.
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.
French astronomer Alphonse Borrelly was the first person to discover the comet on the early morning of 24 July 1900, while William Robert Brooks independently spotted the same comet about 15 minutes later. [4] They reported the comet as a 9th-magnitude object with a short tail located within the constellation Aries.
The Devil Comet has a good chance of being the most visible on Sunday, April 21. This is when the comet will reach its perihelion: the closest point to the sun on its orbital path.
The comet was first photographed by astronomer Lin Chi-Sheng (林啟生) with a 0.41-metre (16 in) telescope at the Lulin Observatory in Nantou, Taiwan on July 11, 2007. . However, it was the 19-year-old Ye Quanzhi (葉泉志) from Sun Yat-sen University in China, who identified the new object from three of the photographs taken by Lin