I went to Wikipedia, and they have a nice animation, but it doesn’t show its entire path. And I can’t figure out what it is orbiting and why it was seen for so long. My sister remembers it being in the sky for weeks (1997), but I don’t remember ever seeing it. I know I was busy, but how could I possibly be THAT busy?
In: Planetary Science
[Wikipedia: Hale-Bopp. See Orbital changes for animation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Comet_Hale%E2%80%93Bopp&diffonly=true)
Hale-Bopp is on a super long orbit around the Sun, taking about 4,200 years to complete one trip. It was visible for a long time in 1997 because it was pretty close to Earth and the Sun at that point. Its orbit is highly elliptical, so it spends most of its time far away from the Sun and Earth, which is why we won’t see it again for a very long time. If you missed it back then, it’s just a case of bad timing or being too busy.
It’s orbiting the sun.
The orbit is a very long and thin ellipse, with the sun very close (about one Earth-sun distance) to one tip. The other tip is about 354 times as far in the other direction, so it’s kind of hard to draw in a picture that also shows Earth’s orbit.
It’s part of our solar system, but the Wiki mentions the orbit is Barycentric, meaning that it doesn’t orbit an object like the sun but instead orbits around a point defined mathematically given the masses of other objects.
Beyond the planets, there is the Oort Cloud, which extends thousands of times farther from the sun than Earth.
Hale-Bopp spends much of its time in the Oort Cloud, but flies through the inner solar system every once in a long (*long*) while.
Hale-Bopp’s previous pass was 4000-ish years ago, but a close pass with Jupiter changed the orbit. It’ll be back in 2000-ish years, not 4000.
It is orbiting the sun. It will not return in 4200 years, It was 4200 years ago it was the last time close to the sun, but when it passed by Jupiter in 1996 its gravitational files changed the orbit and it is today roughly 2,399 years.
The farthest point from the sun in is orbit is around 354 AU, 1 AU is the average distance between the earth and the sun. The speed slows down the farther it get from the sun so the speed is a lot lower for most of its orbit compared to when we see it from Earth. It is a lot farther than Pluto which orbits at around 39 AU.
The closest other star to use is Alpha Centaur is around 276,000 AU so Hale-Bops orbit takes it around 1.3% of the distance to it. I have no idea if it move in that direction or not but it give you an idea how sort it travles compared to the distance to other stars.
Voyager 1 that is the probe that has traveled the furthered is now at around 163 AU. It traveled faster the Hale-Bopp and carefully planned interaction with planes speed it up instead of slow it down as Hale-Bopp did so it has reached that distance in 46 years.
It’s still orbiting the sun, but the distance becomes so huge that it’s hard to show in an animation.
I think you might be underestimating orbital distances, and how SLOW the universe makes really fast moving things seem.
Hale-Bopp is in a long orbit around the sun. Orbital mechanics are crazy. Physics and science and shit. Orbits don’t go in a nice even circle, not even the planets. The Sun’s gravity pulls them in, but can’t quite capture them, so then they sling shot around the other side and go way far out before coming back. So an orbit is not a nice circle, it’s this big oval around the sun.
But the oval doesn’t have the sun in the middle, it has it on one end of the oval. So a comet like Hale-Bopp will come around the sun all fast and furious and glorious, and then head back out on its elliptical orbit, and do its boring thing out in space for many years, before the subtile pull of the sun’s gravity brings it back, and eventually, in 4200 years, the Earth will get to see it again.
Sorry, I know this probably doesn’t answer your question very well. But in short, the solar system is way bigger than you can imagine, 4200 years is an eye blink in the life of the cosmos, orbits aren’t nice circles, and Hale-bopp told me it just needs some space from you, specifically.
It’s orbiting the Sun, just like everything else in the solar system. It is just in a very eccentric orbit.
It goes so far from the Sun at its furthest point (aphelion) that it takes a long time to get back.
Pluto, for example, is for far from the Sun that its orbit takes 248 years to complete one orbit.
Hale-Bopp has a semi major axis nearly 4.5x that of Pluto, which is why it has a period nearly 9.5x as long.
Kepler’s 3rd law, T^2 is proportional to a^3 (period and semi major axis)
Hale-Bopp has a period of about 2400 years, it returning in the year 4385, not returning every 4200 years.
This should help. It’s a visualisation of Hale-Bopp’s orbit. It’s orbiting the Sun.
[https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem?obj=halebopp](https://theskylive.com/3dsolarsystem?obj=halebopp)
Orbiting? Your mama. It’s gonna take awhile to get all the back around…
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