New answers tagged comets
4
I think I get it - you are trying to calculate a luminosity based on some assumption about how much light is reflected/scattered from the Sun towards the Earth - hence the relevance of the flux from the Sun at the comet.
I think it's very hard to adopt this approach. There is uncertainty about what is the appropriate geometry to use for the comet and how the ...
7
Without knowing anything specific about this comet, you can use Kepler's third law to get an idea whether this could be the case. It says that
the cube of the semi-major axis is proportional to the square of the orbital period (with the same factor for all bodies orbiting the same central body):
$$a^3 \propto T^2 $$
Comparing this to earth (which orbits the ...
13
No. Halley's Comet has an aphelion of 35 AU, which is far less than the believed boundaries of the Oort cloud.
Any object on an elliptical orbit with a perihelion of 0.6 AU and an aphelion of 2,000 AU has a semimajor axis of about 1,000 AU, and orbital period of about 31,600 years, much longer than Halley's Comet's current orbital period of 75-76 years. To ...
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