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
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.
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