Comet Hyakutake passed very close to Earth in March 1996. It was dubbed The Great Comet of 1996; its passage near the Earth was one of the closest cometary approaches of the previous 200 years. The comet appeared very bright in the night sky and was widely seen around the world.
About Comet Hyakutake in brief
Comet Hyakutake passed very close to Earth in March 1996. It was dubbed The Great Comet of 1996; its passage near the Earth was one of the closest cometary approaches of the previous 200 years. The comet appeared very bright in the night sky and was widely seen around the world. It temporarily upstaged the much anticipated Comet Hale–Bopp, which was approaching the inner Solar System at the time. Scientific observations of the comet led to several discoveries. The Ulysses spacecraft unexpectedly crossed the comet’s tail at a distance of more than 500 million kilometres from the nucleus, showing that HyakUTake had the longest tail known for a comet. By mid-March, the comet was still fairly unremarkable, shining at 4th to 5th magnitude with a tail about 5degrees long. As it neared Earth, it became brighter and its tail grew in length. By March 24, it was the brightest objects in the sky, with a notably bluish-green colour. The closest approach occurred on March 25 at 0.1 AU. It covered just a few minutes in a few hours; its movement could be detected against the stars in just minutes. It is a long-period comet. Its orbital period was about 17,000 years, but the gravitational perturbation of the giant planets has increased this period to 70,000 years.
Its orbit meant that it had last been to the inner solar System approximately 17,00 years earlier. It had a notably bright tail that stretched 35 degrees, stretched 35 minutes across the sky and covered 35 minutes of the sky in a bluish green colour. It would also be visible throughout the night to northern hemisphere observers at its closest approach because of its path, passing veryclose to the pole star. It has a magnitude of 13.3 and a coma approximately 2. 5 arcminutes across. At the time of its discovery it was shining at magnitude 11. 0 and had a coma about 2. 4 AU from the Sun. It became visible to the naked eye in early March 1996; it was visible in the early to mid-morning hours of March 24. It appeared to be moving so rapidly across the night that its movement was so rapidly that it could be seen against the starry sky in just a couple of minutes. This would be an unusual occurrence, because most comets are close to the Sun in thesky when the comets appearing in a sky not completely dark, leading to the comet appearing in early morning hours.
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This page is based on the article Comet Hyakutake published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 11, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
