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Large, Distant Comets


Waspie_Dwarf

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Large, Distant Comets More Common Than Previously Thought

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Comets that take more than 200 years to make one revolution around the Sun are notoriously difficult to study. Because they spend most of their time far from our area of the solar system, many "long-period comets" will never approach the Sun in a person's lifetime. In fact, those that travel inward from the Oort Cloud -- a group of icy bodies beginning roughly 186 billion miles (300 billion kilometers) away from the Sun -- can have periods of thousands or even millions of years.

NASA's WISE spacecraft, scanning the entire sky at infrared wavelengths, has delivered new insights about these distant wanderers. Scientists found that there are about seven times more long-period comets measuring at least 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) across than had been predicted previously. They also found that long-period comets are on average up to twice as large as "Jupiter family comets," whose orbits are shaped by Jupiter’s gravity and have periods of less than 20 years.

Researchers also observed that in eight months, three to five times as many long-period comets passed by the Sun than had been predicted. The findings are published in the Astronomical Journal.

arrow3.gif  Read More: NASA

 

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  • Waspie_Dwarf

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  • Frank_Hoenedge

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I always look at these topics with a bit of hesitancy and this one can be summed up thusly;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scholz's_star

Estimates indicate that the WISE 0720−0846 system passed about 52,000 astronomical units (0.25 parsecs; 0.82 light-years) from the Sun about 70,000 years ago.

A star is expected to pass through the Oort Cloud every 100,000 years or so (43k stellar fly-bys inside the oort cloud)

 

I do love hobbycrafting Astrophysics.

 

 

 

 

 

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