Part 10 Wednesday February 16 2022 11 37 PM Comets and Asteroids Comets Unlike any other object in the night time star their apperance is erratic and unpredicatable Most Famous Commet Halley s Comet Issiac newton noted that the comet appeared in 1680 following a parabolic orbit and caclulated its orbit using mathmatical equations Soon Edmond Halley used Newton s method and looked back athe ancient recordings and found that over time this single comet wheeled around the sun and is in a closed ellipse every 75 years or so He predicted the next visit in 1758 9 and the comet thereafter bore his name Question Based on the information that you read which year did Halley s Comet return last Answer 1986 Comets generally trend Most are periodic and orbit around the sun that in a time period that is fized If we know the period we can predict when a comet is going to appear exactly as we saw in the case of Halley s comet Periods of Comets differ Significantly Halepopp has a period of 2400 years Hyakutake 14000 years Enckle 3 3 years Based on time periods astronomers classify comets into two categories Short period comets period of less than 200 years Long period comets periods of greater than 200 years and have orbits that are often unpredictable difficult to detect and catalouge they may not always return on their steps Question Identify which of these are classified as short period comets and which ones are long period comets Answer D Comets Ikeya Seki and Hale Bopp are long period and the other two are short period Why do comments have varied periods Small bodies orbiting the sun beyond neptune and they are called trans neptunians with diameters larger than 100 km outward of orbit of Neptune 30 50AU They are confined within a thick band around the elliptical leading to the realization that they occupy a ring or belt surrounding the sun Referred to as the Kuiper Belt after the Dutch American astronomer Gerald Kuiper Some of the kupier belt objects get thrown out of their stable otbit from the gravitational perturbation from giant planets like Uranus and Neptune Due to the the gravitational force from the sun
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