Comet 46P/​Wirtanen

Comet 46P/​Wirtanen was dis­covered pho­to­graph­ic­ally on Janu­ary 17, 1948, by the Amer­ic­an astro­nomer Carl A. Wir­tan­en. The plate was exposed on Janu­ary 15 dur­ing a stel­lar prop­er motion sur­vey for the Lick Obser­vat­ory. Due to a lim­ited num­ber of ini­tial obser­va­tions, it took more than a year to recog­nize this object as a short-peri­od comet with a cur­rent orbit­al peri­od of 5.4 years. It belongs to the Jupiter fam­ily of comets, all of which have aphelia between 5 and 6 AU. Its dia­met­er is estim­ated at 1.2 kilometres.

[descrip­tion from wikipedia]

Details

↑ Back to Comets