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 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.
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