Tag Info

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 ...

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 ...

5

The quotation is probably referring to The Great Comet of 1861. According to this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/1861_J1 The comet may have interacted with the Earth in an almost unprecedented way. For two days, when the comet was at its closest, the Earth was actually within the comet's tail, and streams of cometary material converging ...

3

A comet's impressiveness is not so much determined by the nucleus size - it depends on its activity, and thus its coma and tail size. Activity is not easily relatable to the size of the comet, but there is a way: As to the influence of the size of the comet: it has an influence on the tensile strength of the cometary material due to compaction. Following the ...

2

Typically it was visible a few weeks only, about 3...6 months at most. There is an excellent summary in Broughton (1979). In 1910 the peak visibility was in April, the last recorded sighting of Halley without instrumentation on 13th June. Yeonan (1986) gives an overview including instrumentation; while it has positional and brightness data for dates in 1911, ...

Only top voted, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible