Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Comet Grigg–Skjellerup (formally designated 26P/Grigg–Skjellerup) is a periodic comet. It was visited by the Giotto probe in July 1992. [ 6 ] The spacecraft came as close as 200 km, but could not take pictures because some instruments were damaged from its encounter with Halley's Comet . [ 7 ]
The comet wasn't recovered and became lost. In 2024 it was noted that Mars-crossing asteroid 2007 HE 4, which was discovered by LINEAR on 17 April 2007 with an apparent magnitude of 18.7–19.5, had a comet-like orbit. Maik Meyer found that the asteroid's orbit was a good match with the proposed orbit of comet Denning. [3]
This is a list of comets (bodies that travel in elliptical, parabolic, and sometimes hyperbolic orbits and display a tail behind them) listed by type. Comets are sorted into four categories: periodic comets (e.g. Halley's Comet), non-periodic comets (e.g. Comet Hale–Bopp), comets with no meaningful orbit (the Great Comet of 1106), and lost comets (), displayed as either P (periodic), C (non ...
Their orbits typically take them out to the region of the outer planets (Jupiter and beyond) at aphelion; for example, the aphelion of Halley's Comet is a little beyond the orbit of Neptune. 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 ...
Astronomers have been discovering weakly hyperbolic comets that were perturbed out of the Oort Cloud since the mid-1800s. Prior to finding a well-determined orbit for comets, the JPL Small-Body Database and the Minor Planet Center list comet orbits as having an assumed eccentricity of 1.0. (This is the eccentricity of a parabolic trajectory ...
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 ...
These comets come from the Kuiper belt and scattered disk, beyond the orbit of Pluto, with possible origins in the Oort cloud for many. For comets with an orbital period of over 1000 years (semi-major axis greater than ~100 AU), see the List of near-parabolic comets.
Often, these comets, due to their extreme semimajor axes and eccentricity, will have small orbital interactions with planets and minor planets, most often ending up with the comets fluctuating significantly in their orbital path. These comets probably come from the Oort cloud, a cloud of comets orbiting the Sun from ~10,000 to roughly 50,000 AU ...