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 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.
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