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Great comet

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Comet McNaught as the Great Comet of 2007

A great comet is a comet that becomes exceptionally bright. There is no official definition; often the term is attached to comets such as Halley's Comet, which during certain appearances are bright enough to be noticed by casual observers who are not looking for them, and become well known outside the astronomical community. Great comets appear at irregular, unpredictable intervals, on average about once per decade. Although comets are officially named after their discoverers, great comets are sometimes also referred to by the year in which they appeared great, using the formulation "The Great Comet of ...", followed by the year.

Causes

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The Great Comet of 1680 over Rotterdam as painted by Lieve Verschuier

The vast majority of comets are never bright enough to be seen by the naked eye, and generally pass through the inner Solar System unseen by anyone except astronomers. However, occasionally a comet may brighten to naked eye visibility, and even more rarely it may become as bright as or brighter than the brightest stars. The requirements for this to occur are: a large and active nucleus, a close approach to the Sun, and a close approach to the Earth. A comet fulfilling all three of these criteria will certainly be very bright. Sometimes, a comet failing on one criterion will still be bright. For example, Comet Hale–Bopp did not approach the Sun very closely, but had an exceptionally large and active nucleus. It was visible to the naked eye for several months and was very widely observed. Similarly, Comet Hyakutake was a relatively small comet, but appeared bright because it passed very close to the Earth.

Size and activity of the nucleus

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Cometary nuclei vary in size from a few hundreds of metres across or less to many kilometres across. When they approach the Sun, large amounts of gas and dust are ejected by cometary nuclei, due to solar heating. A crucial factor in how bright a comet becomes is how large and how active its nucleus is. After many returns to the inner Solar System, cometary nuclei become depleted in volatile materials and thus are much less bright than comets which are making their first passage through the Solar System.

Comets
Comet Hale-Bopp

The sudden brightening of Comet Holmes in 2007 showed the importance of the activity of the nucleus in the comet's brightness. On October 23–24, 2007, the comet underwent a sudden outburst which caused it to brighten by factor of about half a million. It unexpectedly brightened from an apparent magnitude of about 17 to about 2.8 in a period of only 42 hours, making it visible to the naked eye. All these temporarily made comet 17P the largest (by radius) object in the Solar System although its nucleus is estimated to be only about 3.4 km in diameter.

Close perihelion approach

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The brightness of a simple reflective body varies with the inverse square of its distance from the Sun. That is, if an object's distance from the Sun is halved, its brightness is quadrupled. However, comets behave differently, due to their ejection of large amounts of volatile gas which then also reflect sunlight and may also fluoresce. Their brightness varies roughly as the inverse cube of their distance from the Sun, meaning that if a comet's distance from the Sun is halved, it will become eight times as bright.

This means that the peak brightness of a comet depends significantly on its distance from the Sun. For most comets, the perihelion of their orbit lies outside the Earth's orbit. Any comet approaching the Sun to within 0.5 AU (75 million km) or less may have a chance of becoming a great comet.

Close approach to the Earth

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For a comet to become very bright, it also needs to pass close to the Earth. Halley's Comet, for example, is usually very bright when it passes through the inner Solar System every seventy-six years, but during its 1986 apparition, its closest approach to Earth was almost the most distant possible. The comet became visible to the naked eye, but was unspectacular. On the other hand, the intrinsically small and faint Comet Hyakutake (C/1996 B2) appeared very bright and spectacular due to its very close approach to Earth at its nearest during March 1996. Its passage near the Earth was one of the closest cometary approaches on record with a distance of 0.1 AU (15 million km; 39 LD).

List of great comets

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The Great Comet of 1843, by Charles Piazzi Smyth

Great comets of the past two millennia include the following:

Notes

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  1. ^ A winter comet reported by Ephorus
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Donald K. Yeomans (April 2007). "Great Comets in History". Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology (Solar System Dynamics). Retrieved 2011-02-02.
  3. ^ Ramsey, John T. & Licht, A. Lewis (1997), The Comet of 44 B.C. and Caesar's Funeral Games, Atlanta, ISBN 0-7885-0273-5{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link).
  4. ^ The Living Age, Volume 58. Lithotyped by Cowles and Company, 17 Washington St., Boston. Press of Geo. C. Rand & Avery. 1858. p. 879.
  5. ^ David A. J. Seargent (2009). The Greatest Comets in History: Broom Stars and Celestial Scimitars. Springer Science + Business Media. p. 99. ISBN 978-0-387-09512-7.
  6. ^ "Great Comet of 1471". Atlas of Great Comets. Cambridge University Press: 49–50. 2015. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316145166.010. ISBN 9781107093492.
  7. ^ Vsekhsvyatsky, S. K. (1958). Physical Characteristics of Comets. Moscow: Fizmatgiz. p. 102.
  8. ^ "Great Comet of 1664". Atlas of Great Comets. Cambridge University Press: 72–77. 2015. doi:10.1017/CBO9781316145166.016. ISBN 9781107093492.
  9. ^ Bond, G.P. (1850). "On the great comet of 1844–45". The Astronomical Journal. 1: 97. Bibcode:1850AJ......1...97B. doi:10.1086/100067.
  10. ^ a b "Brightest comets seen since 1935". www.icq.eps.harvard.edu. Retrieved 17 January 2024.
  11. ^ Bortle, J., "The Bright Comet Chronicles", harvard.edu, retrieved 2008-11-18
  12. ^ "The Great Binocular Comet of 2003". Southern Comets Homepage. Retrieved 30 October 2024.
  13. ^ Michael E. Bakich (5 January 2023). "15 Greatest Comets of our Time". www.astronomy.com. Astronomy Magazine. Retrieved 30 October 2024.
  14. ^ "Weekly Information about Bright Comets (2020 July 18: North)". Seiichi Yoshida. July 18, 2020. Archived from the original on July 19, 2020. Retrieved July 18, 2020.
  15. ^ "Seiichi Yoshida's Diary of Comet Observations (2020)". Seiichi Yoshida. July 19, 2020. Archived from the original on July 20, 2020. Retrieved July 19, 2020.
  16. ^ "Comet NEOWISE Updtae: Easy To See In The Evening! When And How To See Comet NEOWISE". Farmer's Almanac. July 18, 2020. Archived from the original on July 19, 2020. Retrieved July 19, 2020.
  17. ^ "APOD: 2022 July 26 - Comet NEOWISE Rising over the Adriatic Sea". NASA. July 26, 2022. Retrieved October 17, 2024.
  18. ^ "Great Comets: What Are They, And When Will the Next Comet Be Visible?". Star Walk. October 16, 2024. Retrieved October 17, 2024.
  19. ^ "APOD: 2024 October 21 – Comet Tsuchinshan ATLAS over California". apod.nasa.gov. Retrieved 2024-10-27.
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