HistoryAncient Greece to the 19th century

The Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that comets were dry exhalations of Earth that caught fire high in the atmosphere or similar exhalations of the planets and stars. However, the Roman philosopher Seneca thought that comets were like the planets, though in much larger orbits. He wrote:

The man will come one day who will explain in what regions the comets move, why they diverge so much from the other stars, what is their size and their nature.

Aristotles view won out and persisted until 1577, when Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe attempted to use parallax to triangulate the distance to a bright comet. Because he could not measure any parallax, Brahe concluded that the comet was very far away, at least four times farther than the Moon.

Brahes student, German astronomer Johannes Kepler, devised his three laws of planetary motion using Brahes meticulous observations of Mars but was unable to fit his theory to the very eccentric orbits of comets. Kepler believed that comets traveled in straight lines through the solar system. The solution came from English scientist Isaac Newton, who used his new law of gravity to calculate a parabolic orbit for the comet of 1680. A parabolic orbit is open, with an eccentricity of exactly 1, meaning the comet would never return. (A circular orbit has an eccentricity of 0.) Any less-eccentric orbits are closed ellipses, which means a comet would return.

Newton was friends with English astronomer Edmond Halley, who used Newtons methods to determine the orbits for 24 observed comets, which he published in 1705. All the orbits were fit with parabolas because the quality of the observations at that time was not good enough to determine elliptical or hyperbolic orbits (eccentricities greater than 1). But Halley noted that the comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 had remarkably similar orbits and had appeared at approximately 76-year intervals. He suggested that it was really one comet in an approximately 76-year orbit that returned at regular intervals. Halley predicted that the comet would return again in 1758. He did not live to see his prediction come true, but the comet was recovered on Christmas Day, 1758, and passed closest to the Sun on March 13, 1759. The comet was the first recognized periodic comet and was named in Halleys honour, Comet Halley.

Halley also speculated whether comets were members of the solar system or not. Although he could only calculate parabolic orbits, he suggested that the orbits were actually eccentric and closed, writing:

For so their Number will be determinate and, perhaps, not so very great. Besides, the Space between the Sun and the fixd Stars is so immense that there is Room enough for a Comet to revolve tho the period of its Revolution be vastly long.

The German astronomer Johann Encke was the second person to recognize a periodic comet. He determined that a comet discovered by French astronomer Jean-Louis Pons in 1818 did not seem to follow a parabolic orbit. He found that the orbit was indeed a closed ellipse. Moreover, he showed that the orbital period of the comet around the Sun was only 3.3 years, still the shortest orbital period of any comet on record. Encke also showed that the same comet had been observed by French astronomer Pierre Mchain in 1786, by British astronomer Caroline Herschel in 1795, and by Pons in 1805. The comet was named in Enckes honour, as Comet Halley was named for the astronomer who described its orbit.

Enckes Comet soon presented a new problem for astronomers. Because it returned so often, its orbit could be predicted precisely based on Newtons law of gravity, with effects from gravitational perturbations by the planets taken into account. But Enckes Comet repeatedly arrived about 2.5 hours too soon. Its orbit was slowly shrinking. The problem became even more complex when it was discovered that other periodic comets arrived too late. Those include the comets 6P/DArrest, 14P/Wolf 1, and even 1P/Halley, which typically returns about four days later than a purely gravitational orbit would predict.

Several explanations were suggested for this phenomenon, such as a resisting interplanetary medium that caused the comet to slowly lose orbital energy. However, that idea could not explain comets whose orbits were growing, not shrinking. German mathematician and astronomer Friedrich Bessel suggested that expulsion of material from a comet near perihelion was acting like a rocket motor and propelling the comet into a slightly shorter- (or longer-) period orbit each time it passed close to the Sun. History would prove Bessel right.

As the quality of the observations and mathematical techniques to calculate orbits improved, it became obvious that most comets were on elliptical orbits and thus were members of the solar system. Many were recognized to be periodic. But some orbit solutions for long-period comets suggested that they were slightly hyperbolic, suggesting that they came from interstellar space. That problem would not be solved until the 20th century.

Another interesting problem for astronomers was a comet discovered in 1826 by the Austrian military officer and astronomer Wilhelm, Freiherr (baron) von Biela. Calculation of its orbit showed that it, like Enckes Comet, was a short-period comet; it had a period of about 6.75 years. It was only the third periodic comet to be confirmed. It was identified with a comet observed by French astronomers Jacques Lebaix Montaigne and Charles Messier in 1772 and by Pons in 1805, and it returned, as predicted, in 1832. In 1839 the comet was too close in the sky to the Sun and could not be observed, but it was seen again on schedule in November 1845. On January 13, 1846, American astronomer Matthew Maury found that there was no longer a single comet: there were two, following each other closely around the Sun. The comets returned as a pair in 1852 but were never seen again. Searches for the comets in 1865 and 1872 were unsuccessful, but a brilliant meteor shower appeared in 1872 coming from the same direction from which the comets should have appeared. Astronomers concluded that the meteor shower was the debris of the disrupted comets. However, they were still left with the question as to why the comet broke up. That recurring meteor shower is now known as the Andromedids, named for the constellation in the sky where it appears to radiate from, but is also sometimes referred to as the Bielids.

The study of meteor showers received a huge boost on November 12 and 13, 1833, when observers saw an incredible meteor shower, with rates of hundreds and perhaps thousands of meteors per hour. That shower was the Leonids, so named because its radiant (or origin) is in the constellation Leo. It was suggested that Earth was encountering interplanetary debris spread along the Earth-crossing orbits of yet unknown bodies in the solar system. Further analysis showed that the orbits of the debris were highly eccentric.

American mathematician Hubert Newton published a series of papers in the 1860s in which he examined historical records of major Leonid meteor showers and found that they occurred about every 33 years. That showed that the Leonid particles were not uniformly spread around the orbit. He predicted another major shower for November 1866. As predicted, a large Leonid meteor storm occurred on November 13, 1866. In the same year, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli computed the orbit of the Perseid meteor shower, usually observed on August 1012 each year, and noted its strong similarity to the orbit of Comet Swift-Tuttle (109P/1862 O1) discovered in 1862. Soon after, the Leonids were shown to have an orbit very similar to Comet Tempel-Tuttle (55P/1865 Y1), discovered in 1865. Since then the parent comets of many meteoroid streams have been identified, though the parent comets of some streams remains a mystery.

Meanwhile, the study of comets benefitted greatly from the improvement in the quality and size of telescopes and the technology for observing comets. In 1858 English portrait artist William Usherwood took the first photograph of a comet, Comet Donati (C/1858 L1), followed by American astronomer George Bond the next night. The first photographic discovery of a comet was made by American astronomer Edward Barnard in 1892, while he was photographing the Milky Way. The comet, which was in a short-period orbit, was known as D/Barnard 3 because it was soon lost, but it was recovered by Italian astronomer Andrea Boattini in 2008 and is now known as Comet Barnard/Boattini (206P/2008 T3). In 1864 Italian astronomer Giovanni Donati was the first to look at a comet through a spectroscope, and he discovered three broad emission bands that are now known to be caused by long-chain carbon molecules in the coma. The first spectrogram (a spectrum recorded on film) was of Comet Tebbutt (C/1881 K1), taken by English astronomer William Huggins on June 24, 1881. Later the same night, an American doctor and amateur astronomer, Henry Draper, took spectra of the same comet. Both men later became professional astronomers.

Some years before the appearance of Comet Halley in 1910, the molecule cyanogen was identified as one of the molecules in the spectra of cometary comae. Cyanogen is a poisonous gas derived from hydrogen cyanide (HCN), a well-known deadly poison. It was also detected in Halleys coma as that comet approached the Sun in 1910. That led to great consternation as Earth was predicted to pass through the tail of the comet. People panicked, bought comet pills, and threw end-of-the-world parties. But when the comet passed by only 0.15 AU away on the night of May 1819, 1910, there were no detectable effects.

The 20th century saw continued progress in cometary science. Spectroscopy revealed many of the molecules, radicals, and ions in the comae and tails of comets. An understanding began to develop about the nature of cometary tails, with the ion (Type I) tails resulting from the interaction of ionized molecules with some form of corpuscular radiation, possibly electrons and protons, from the Sun, and the dust (Type II) tails coming from solar radiation pressure on the fine dust particles emitted from the comet.

Astronomers continued to ask, Where do the comets come from? There were three schools of thought: (1) that comets were captured from interstellar space, (2) that comets were erupted out of the giant planets, or (3) that comets were primeval matter that had not been incorporated into the planets. The first idea had been suggested by French mathematician and astronomer Pierre Laplace in 1813, while the second came from another French mathematician-astronomer, Joseph Lagrange. The third came from English astronomer George Chambers in 1910.

The idea of an interstellar origin for comets ran into some serious problems. First, astronomers showed that capture of an interstellar comet by Jupiter, the most massive planet, was a highly unlikely event and probably could not account for the number of short-period comets then known. Also, no comets had ever been observed on truly hyperbolic orbits. Some long-period comets did have orbit solutions that were slightly hyperbolic, barely above an eccentricity of 1.0. But a truly hyperbolic comet approaching the solar system with the Suns velocity relative to the nearby stars of about 20 km (12 miles) per second would have an eccentricity of 2.0.

In 1914 Swedish-born Danish astronomer Elis Strmgren published a special list of cometary orbits. Strmgren took the well-determined orbits of long-period comets and projected them backward in time to before the comets had entered the planetary region. He then referenced the orbits to the barycentre (the centre of mass) of the entire solar system. He found that most of the apparently hyperbolic orbits became elliptical. That proved that the comets were members of the solar system. Orbits of that type are referred to as original orbits, whereas the orbit of a comet as it passes through the planetary region is called the osculating (or instantaneous) orbit, and the orbit after the comet has left the planetary region is called the future orbit.

The idea of comets erupting from giant planets was favoured by the Soviet astronomer Sergey Vsekhsvyatsky based on similar molecules having been discovered in both the atmospheres of the giant planets and in cometary comae. The idea helped to explain the many short-period comets that regularly encountered Jupiter. But the giant planets have very large escape velocities, about 60 km (37 miles) per second in the case of Jupiter, and it was difficult to understand what physical process could achieve those velocities. So Vsekhsvyatsky moved the origin sites to the satellites of the giant planets, which had far lower escape velocities. However, most scientists still did not believe in the eruption model. The discovery of volcanos on Jupiters large satellite Io by the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1979 briefly resurrected the idea, but Ios composition proved to be a very poor match to the composition of comets.

Another idea about cometary origins was promoted by the English astronomer Raymond Lyttleton in a research paper in 1951 and a book, The Comets and Their Origin, in 1953. Because it was known that some comets were associated with meteor showers observed on Earth, the sandbank model suggested that a comet was simply a cloud of meteoritic particles held together by its own gravity. Interplanetary gases were adsorbed on the surfaces of the dust grains and escaped when the comet came close to the Sun and the particles were heated. Lyttleton went on to explain that comets were formed when the Sun and solar system passed through an interstellar dust cloud. The Suns gravity focused the passing dust in its wake, and these subclouds then collapsed under their own gravity to form the cometary sandbanks.

One problem with that theory was that Lyttleton estimated that the gravitational focusing by the Sun would bring the particles together only about 150 AU behind the Sun and solar system. But that did not agree well with the known orbits of long-period comets, which showed no concentration of comets that would have formed at that distance or in that direction. In addition, the total amount of gases that could be adsorbed on a sandbank cloud was not sufficient to explain the measured gas production rates of many observed comets.

In 1948 Dutch astronomer Adrianus van Woerkom, as part of his Ph.D. thesis work at the University of Leiden, examined the role of Jupiters gravity in changing the orbits of comets as they passed through the planetary system. He showed that Jupiter could scatter the orbits in energy, leading to either longer or shorter orbital periods and correspondingly to larger or smaller orbits. In some cases the gravitational perturbations from Jupiter were sufficient to change the previously elliptical orbits of the comets to hyperbolic, ejecting them from the solar system and sending them into interstellar space. Van Woerkom also showed that because of Jupiter, repeated passages of comets through the solar system would lead to a uniform distribution in orbital energy for the long-period comets, with as many long-period comets ending in very long-period orbits as in very short-period orbits. Finally, van Woerkom showed that Jupiter would eventually eject all the long-period comets to interstellar space over a time span of about one million years. Thus, the comets needed to be resupplied somehow.

Van Woerkoms thesis adviser was the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who had become famous in the 1920s for his work on the structure and rotation of the Milky Way Galaxy. Oort became interested in the problem of where the long-period comets came from. Building on van Woerkoms work, Oort closely examined the energy distribution of long-period comet original orbits as determined by Strmgren. He found that, as van Woerkom had predicted, there was a uniform distribution of orbital energies for most energy values. But, surprisingly, there was also a large excess of comets with orbital semimajor axes (half of the long axis of the comets elliptical orbit) larger than 20,000 AU.

Oort suggested that the excess of orbits at very large distances could only be explained if the long-period comets came from there. He proposed that the solar system was surrounded by a vast cloud of comets that stretched halfway to the nearest stars. He showed that gravitational perturbations by random passing stars would perturb the orbits in the comet cloud, occasionally sending a comet into the planetary region where it could be observed. Oort referred to those comets making their first passage through the planetary region as new comets. As the new comets pass through the planetary region, Jupiters gravity takes control of their orbits, spreading them in orbital energy, and either capturing them to shorter periods or ejecting them to interstellar space.

Based on the number of comets seen each year, Oort estimated that the cloud contained 190 billion comets; today that number is thought to be closer to one trillion comets. Oorts hypothesis was all the more impressive because it was based on accurate original orbits for only 19 comets. In his honour, the cloud of comets surrounding the solar system is called the Oort cloud.

Oort noticed that the number of long-period comets returning to the planetary system was far less than what his model predicted. To account for that, he suggested that the comets were physically lost by disruption (as had happened to Bielas Comet). Oort proposed two values for the disruption rate of comets on each perihelion passage, 0.3 and 1.9 percent, which both gave reasonably good results when comparing his predictions with the actual energy distribution, except for an excess of new comets at near-zero energy.

In 1979 American astronomer Paul Weissman (the author of this article) published computer simulations of the Oort cloud energy distribution using planetary perturbations by Jupiter and Saturn and physical models of loss mechanisms such as random disruption and formation of a nonvolatile crust, based on actual observations of comets. He showed that a very good agreement with the observed energy distribution could be obtained if new comets were disrupted about 10 percent of the time on the first perihelion passage from the Oort cloud and about 4 percent of the time on subsequent passages. Also, comet nuclei developed nonvolatile crusts, cutting off all coma activity, after about 10100 returns, on average.

In 1981 American astronomer Jack Hills suggested that in addition to the Oort cloud there was also an inner cloud extending inward toward the planetary region to about 1,000 AU from the Sun. Comets are not seen coming from this region because their orbits are too tightly bound to the Sun; stellar perturbations are typically not strong enough to change their orbits significantly. Hills hypothesized that only if a star came very close, even penetrating through the Oort cloud, could it excite the orbits of the comets in the inner cloud, sending a shower of comets into the planetary system.

But where did the Oort cloud come from? At large distances on the order of 104105 AU from the Sun, the solar nebula would have been too thin to form large bodies like comets that are several kilometres in diameter. The comets had to have formed much closer to the planetary region. Oort suggested that the comets were thrown out of the asteroid belt by close encounters with Jupiter. At that time it was not known that most asteroids are rocky, carbonaceous, or iron bodies and that only a fraction contain any water.

Oorts work was preceded in part by that of the Estonian astronomer Ernst pik. In 1932 pik published a paper examining what happened to meteors or comets scattered to very large distances from the Sun, where they could be perturbed by random passing stars. He showed that the gravitational tugs from the stars would raise the perihelion distances of most objects to beyond the most distant planet. Thus, he predicted that there would be a cloud of comets surrounding the solar system. However, pik said little about the comets returning to the planetary region, other than that some comets could be thrown into the Sun by the stars during their evolution outward to the cloud. Indeed, pik concluded:

comets of an aphelion distance exceeding 10,000 a.u., are not very likely to occur among the observable objects, because of the rapid increase of the average perihelion distance due to stellar perturbations.

pik also failed to make any comparison between his results and the known original orbits of the long-period comets.

Oorts paper, published in 1950, revolutionized the field of cometary dynamics. Two months later a paper on the nature of the cometary nucleus by Fred Whipple would do the same for cometary physics. Whipple combined many of the ideas of the day and suggested that the cometary nucleus was a solid body made up of volatile ices and meteoritic material. That was called the icy conglomerate model but also became more popularly known as the dirty snowball.

Whipple provided proof for his model in the form of the shrinking orbit of Enckes Comet. Whipple believed that, as Bessel had suggested, rocket forces from sublimating ices on the sunlit side of the nucleus would alter the comets orbit. For a nonrotating solid nucleus, the force would push the nucleus away from the Sun, appearing to lessen the effect of gravity. But if the comet nucleus was rotating (as most solar system bodies do) and if the rotation pole was not perpendicular to the plane of the comets orbit, both tangential forces (forward or backward along the comets direction of motion) and out-of-plane forces (up or down) could result. The effect was helped by the thermal lag caused by the Sun continuing to heat the nucleus surface after local noontime, just as temperatures on Earth are usually at their maximum a few hours after local noon.

Thus, Whipple explained the slow shrinking of Enckes orbit as the result of tangential forces that were pointed opposite to the comets direction of motion, causing the comet nucleus to slow down, slowly shrinking the orbit. That model also explained periodic comets whose orbits were growing, such as DArrest and Wolf 1, depending on the direction of the nucleis rotation poles and the direction in which the nuclei were rotating. Because the rocket force results from the high activity of the comet nucleus near perihelion, the force does not change the perihelion distance but rather the aphelion distance, either raising or lowering it.

Whipple also pointed out that the loss of cometary ices would leave a layer of nonvolatile material on the surface of the nucleus, making sublimation more difficult, as the heat from the Sun needed to filter down through multiple layers to where there were fresh ices. Furthermore, Whipple suggested that the solar systems zodiacal dust cloud came from dust released by comets as they passed through the planetary system.

Whipples ideas set off an intense debate over whether the nucleus was a solid body or not. Many scientists still advocated Lyttletons idea of a sandbank nucleus, simply a cloud of meteoritic material with adsorbed gases. The question would not be put definitively to rest until the first spacecraft encounters with Halleys Comet in 1986.

Solid proof for Whipples nongravitational force model came from English astronomer Brian Marsden, a colleague of Whipples at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Marsden was an expert on comet and asteroid orbits and tested Whipples icy conglomerate model against the orbits of many known comets. Using a computer program that determined the orbits of comets and asteroids from observations, Marsden added a term for the expected rocket effect when the comet was active. In this he was aided by Belgian astronomer Armand Delsemme, who carefully calculated the rate of water ice sublimation as a function of a comets distance from the Sun.

When one calculates an orbit for an object, the calculation usually does not fit all the observed positions of the object perfectly. Small errors creep into the observed positions for many reasons, such as not knowing the exact time of the observations or finding the positions using an out-of-date star catalog. So every orbit fit has a mean residual, which is the average difference between the observations and the comets predicted position based on the newly determined orbit. Mean residuals of less than about 1.5 arc seconds are considered a good fit.

When Marsden calculated the comet orbits, he found that he could obtain smaller mean residuals if he included the rocket force in his calculations. Marsden found that for a short-period comet, the magnitude of the rocket force was typically only a few hundred-thousandths of the solar gravitational attraction, but that was enough to change the time when the comet would return. Later, Marsden and colleagues computed the rocket forces for long-period comets and found that there too the mean residuals were reduced. For the long-period comets, the rocket force was typically a few ten-thousandths of the solar gravitational attraction. Long-period comets tend to be far more active than short-period comets, and thus for them the force is larger.

A further interesting result of Marsdens work was that when he performed his calculations on apparently hyperbolic comet orbits, the resulting eccentricities often changed from hyperbolic to elliptical. Very few comets were left with hyperbolic original orbits, and all of those were only slightly hyperbolic. Marsden had provided further proof that all long-period comets were members of the solar system.

In 1951 the Dutch American astronomer Gerard Kuiper published an important paper on where the comets had formed. Kuiper was studying the origin of the solar system and suggested that the volatile molecules, radicals, and ions observed in cometary comae and tails (e.g., CH, NH, OH, CN, CO+, CO2+, N2+) must come from ices frozen in the solid nucleus (e.g., CH4, NH3, H2O, HCN, CO, CO2, and N2). But those ices could only condense in the solar nebula where it was very cold. So he suggested that comets had formed at 3850 AU from the Sun, where mean temperatures were only about 3045 K (243 to 228 C, or 406 to 379 F).

Kuiper suggested that the solar nebula did not end at the orbit of what was then considered the most distant planet, Pluto, at about 39 AU, but that it continued on to about 50 AU. He believed that at those large distances from the Sun neither the density of solar nebula material nor the time was enough to form another planet. Rather, he suggested that there would be a belt of smaller bodiesi.e., cometsbetween 38 and 50 AU. He also suggested that Pluto would dynamically eject comets from that region to distant orbits, forming the Oort cloud.

Astronomers have since discovered that Pluto is too small to have done that job (or even to be considered a planet), and it is really Neptune at 30 AU that defines the outer boundary of the planetary system. Neptune is large enough to slowly scatter comets both inward to short-period orbits and outward to the Oort cloud, along with some help from the other giant planets.

Kuipers 1951 paper did not achieve the same fame as those by Oort and Whipple in 1950, but astronomers occasionally followed up his ideas. In 1968 Egyptian astronomer Salah Hamid worked with Whipple and Marsden to study the orbits of seven comets that passed near the region of Kuipers hypothetical comet belt beyond Neptune. They found no evidence of gravitational perturbations from the belt and set upper limits on the mass of the belt of 0.5 Earth masses out to 40 AU and 1.3 Earth masses out to 50 AU.

The situation changed in 1980 when Uruguayan astronomer Julio Fernndez suggested that a comet belt beyond Neptune would be a good source for the short-period comets. Up until that time it was thought that short-period comets were long-period comets from the Oort cloud that had dynamically evolved to short-period orbits because of planetary perturbations, primarily by Jupiter. But astronomers who tried to simulate that process on computers found that it was very inefficient and likely could not supply new short-period comets fast enough to replace the existing ones that either were disrupted, faded away, or were perturbed out of the planetary region.

Fernndez recognized that a key element in understanding the short-period comets was their relatively low-inclination orbits. Typical short-period comets have orbital inclinations up to about 35, whereas long-period comets have completely random orbital inclinations from 0 to 180. Fernndez suggested that the easiest way to produce a low-inclination short-period comet population was to start with a source that had a relatively low inclination. Kuipers hypothesized comet belt beyond Neptune fit this requirement. Fernndez used dynamical simulations to show how comets could be perturbed by larger bodies in the comet belt, on the order of the size of Ceres, the largest asteroid (diameter of about 940 km [580 miles]), and be sent into orbits that could encounter Neptune. Neptune then could pass about half of the comets inward to Uranus, with the other half being sent outward to the Oort cloud. In that manner, comets could be handed down to each giant planet and finally to Jupiter, which placed the comets in short-period orbits.

Fernndezs paper renewed interest in a possible comet belt beyond Neptune. In 1988 American astronomer Martin Duncan and Canadian astronomers Thomas Quinn and Scott Tremaine built a more complex computer simulation of the trans-Neptunian comet belt and again showed that it was the likely source of the short-period comets. They also proposed that the belt be named in honour of Gerard Kuiper, based on the predictions of his 1951 paper. As fate would have it, the distant comet belt had also been predicted in two lesser-known papers in 1943 and 1949 by a retired Irish army officer and astronomer, Kenneth Edgeworth. Therefore, some scientists refer to the comet belt as the Kuiper belt, while others call it the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt.

Astronomers at observatories began to search for the distant objects. In 1992 they were finally rewarded when British astronomer David Jewitt and Vietnamese American astronomer Jane Luu found an object well beyond Neptune in an orbit with a semimajor axis of 43.9 AU, an eccentricity of only 0.0678, and an inclination of only 2.19. The object, officially designated (15760) 1992 QB1, has a diameter of about 200 km (120 miles). Since 1992 more than 1,500 objects have been found in the Kuiper belt, some almost as large as Pluto. In fact, it was the discovery of that swarm of bodies beyond Neptune that led to Pluto being recognized in 2006 as simply one of the largest bodies in the swarm and no longer a planet. (The same thing happened to the largest asteroid Ceres in the mid-19th century when it was recognized as simply the largest body in the asteroid belt and not a true planet.)

In 1977 American astronomer Charles Kowal discovered an unusual object orbiting the Sun among the giant planets. Named 2060 Chiron, it is about 200 km (120 miles) in diameter and has a low-inclination orbit that stretches from 8.3 AU (inside the orbit of Saturn) to 18.85 AU (just inside the orbit of Uranus). Because it can make close approaches to those two giant planets, the orbit is unstable on a time span of several million years. Thus, Chiron likely came from somewhere else. Even more interesting, several years later Chiron began to display a cometary coma even though it was still very far from the Sun. Chiron is one of a few objects that appear in both asteroid and comet catalogs; in the latter it is designated 95 P/Chiron.

Chiron was the first of a new class of objects in giant-planet-crossing orbits to be discovered. The searches for Kuiper belt objects have also led to the discovery of many similar objects orbiting the Sun among the giant planets. Collectively they are now known as the Centaur objects. About 300 such objects have now been found, and more than a few also show sporadic cometary activity.

The Centaurs appear to be objects that are slowly diffusing into the planetary region from the Kuiper belt. Some will eventually be seen as short-period comets, while most others will be thrown into long-period orbits or even ejected to interstellar space.

In 1996 European astronomers Eric Elst and Guido Pizarro found a new comet, which was designated 133P/Elst-Pizarro. But when the orbit of the comet was determined, it was found to lie in the outer asteroid belt with a semimajor axis of 3.16 AU, an eccentricity of 0.162, and an inclination of only 1.39. A search of older records showed that 133P had been observed previously in 1979 as an inactive asteroid. So it is another object that was catalogued as both a comet and an asteroid.

The explanation for 133P was that, given its position in the asteroid belt, where maximum solar surface temperatures are only about 48 C (54 F), it likely acquired some water in the form of ice from the solar nebula. Like in comets, the ices near the surface of 133P sublimated early in its history, leaving an insulating layer of nonvolatile material covering the ice at depth. Then a random impact from a piece of asteroidal debris punched through the insulating layer and exposed the buried ice. Comet 133P has shown regular activity at the same location in its orbit for at least three orbits since it was discovered.

Twelve additional objects in asteroidal orbits have been discovered since that time, most of them also in the outer main belt. They are sometimes referred to as main belt comets, though the more recently accepted term is active asteroids.

The latter half of the 20th century saw a massive leap forward in the understanding of the solar system as a result of spacecraft visits to the planets and their satellites. Those spacecraft collected a wealth of scientific data close up and in situ. The anticipated return of Halleys Comet in 1986 provided substantial motivation to begin using spacecraft to study comets.

The first comet mission (of a sort) was the International Cometary Explorer (ICE) spacecrafts encounter with Comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner on September 11, 1985. The mission had originally been launched as part of a joint project by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the European Space Agency (ESA) known as the International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE). The mission consisted of three spacecraft, two of them, ISEE-1 and -2, in Earth orbit and the third, ISEE-3, positioned in a heliocentric orbit between Earth and the Sun, studying the solar wind in Earths vicinity.

In 1982 and 1983 engineers maneuvered ISEE-3 to accomplish several gravity-assist encounters with the Moon, which put it on a trajectory to encounter 21P/Giacobini-Zinner. The spacecraft was targeted to pass through the ion tail of the comet, about 7,800 km (4,800 miles) behind the nucleus at a relative velocity of 21 km (13 miles) per second, and returned the first in situ measurements of the magnetic field, plasma, and energetic particle environment inside a comets tail. Those measurements confirmed the model of the comets ion tail first put forward in 1957 by the Swedish physicist (and later Nobel Prize winner) Hannes Alfvn. It also showed that H2O+ was the most common ion in the plasma tail, consistent with the Whipple model of an icy conglomerate nucleus. However, ICE carried no instruments to study the nucleus or coma of the comet.

In 1986 five spacecraft were sent to encounter Halleys Comet. They were informally known as the Halley Armada and consisted of two Japanese spacecraft, Suisei and Sakigake (Japanese for comet and pioneer, respectively); two Soviet spacecraft, Vega 1 and 2 (a contraction of Venus-Halley using Cyrillic spelling); and an ESA spacecraft, Giotto (named after the Italian painter who depicted the Star of Bethlehem as a comet in a fresco painted in 130506).

Suisei flew by Halley on March 8, 1986, at a distance of 151,000 km (94,000 miles) on the sunward side and produced ultraviolet images of the comets hydrogen corona, an extension of the visible coma seen only in ultraviolet light. It also measured the energetic particle environment in the solar wind ahead of the comet. Sakigakes closest approach to the comet was on March 11, 1986, at a distance of 6.99 million km (4.34 million miles), and it made additional measurements of the solar wind.

Before flying past Halleys Comet, the two Soviet spacecraft had flown by Venus and had each dropped off landers and balloons to study that planet. Vega 1 flew through the Halley coma on March 6, 1986, to within 8,889 km (5,523 miles) of the nucleus and made numerous measurements of the coma gas and dust composition, plasma and energetic particles, and magnetic field environment. It also returned the first picture ever of a solid cometary nucleus. Unfortunately, the camera was slightly out of focus and had other technical problems that required considerable image processing to see the nucleus. Vega 2 fared much better when it flew through the Halley coma on March 9 to within 8,030 km (4,990 miles) of the nucleus, and its images clearly showed a peanut-shaped nucleus about 16 by 8 km (10 by 5 miles) in diameter. The nucleus was also very dark, reflecting only about 4 percent of the incident sunlight, which had already been established from Earth-based observations.

Both Vega spacecraft carried infrared spectrometers designed to measure the temperature of the Halley nucleus. They found quite warm temperatures between 320 and 400 K (47 and 127 C [116 and 260 F]). That surprised many scientists who had predicted that the effect of water ice sublimation would be to cool the nucleuss surface; water ice requires a great deal of heat to sublimate. The high temperatures suggested that much of the nucleuss surface was not sublimating, but why?

Whipples classic paper in 1950 had suggested that as comets lost material from the surface, some particles were too heavy to escape the weak gravity of the nucleus and fell back onto the surface, forming a lag deposit. That idea was later studied by American astronomer and author David Brin in his thesis work with his adviser, Sri Lankan physicist Asoka Mendis, in 1979. As the lag deposit built up, it would effectively insulate the icy materials below it from sunlight. Calculations showed that a layer only 10100 cm (439 inches) in thickness could completely turn off sublimation from the surface. Brin and Mendis predicted that Halley would be so active that it would blow away any lag deposit, but that was not the case. Only about 30 percent of Halleys sunlit hemisphere was active. Bright dust jets could be seen coming from specific areas on the nucleus surface, but much of the surface showed no visible activity.

Giotto flew through Halleys coma on March 14, 1986, and passed only 596 km (370 miles) from the nucleus. It returned the highest-resolution images of the nucleus and showed a very rugged terrain with mountain peaks jutting up hundreds of metres from the surface. It also showed the same peanut shape that Vega 2 saw but from a different viewing angle and with much greater visible detail. Discrete dust jets were coming off the nucleus surface, but the resolution was not good enough to reveal the source of the jets.

Giotto and both Vega spacecraft obtained numerous measurements of the dust and gas in the coma. Dust particles came in two types: silicate and organic. The silicate grains were typical of rocks found on Earth such as forsterite (Mg2SiO4), a high-temperature mineralthat is, one which would be among the first to condense out of the hot solar nebula. Analyses of other grains showed that the comet was far richer in magnesium relative to iron. The organic grains were composed solely of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen and were called CHON grains based on the chemical symbol for each of those elements. Larger grains were also detected that were combinations of silicate and CHON grains, supporting the view that comet nuclei had accreted from the slow aggregation of tiny particles in the solar nebula.

The three spacecraft also measured gases in the coma, water being the dominant molecule but also carbon monoxide accounting for about 7 percent of the gas relative to water. Formaldehyde, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide were also detected at a few percent relative to water.

The Halley Armada was a rousing success and resulted from international cooperation by many nations. Its success is even more impressive when one considers that the spacecraft all flew by the Halley nucleus at velocities ranging from 68 to 79 km per second (152,000 to 177,000 miles per hour). (The velocities were so high because Halleys retrograde orbit had it going around the Sun in the opposite direction from the spacecraft.)

Giotto was later retargeted using assists from Earths gravity to pass within about 200 km (120 miles) of the nucleus of the comet 26P/Grigg-Skjellrup. The flyby was successful, but some of the scientific instruments, including the camera, were no longer working after being sandblasted at Halley.

The next comet mission was not until 1998, when NASA launched Deep Space 1, a spacecraft designed to test a variety of new technologies. After flying past the asteroid 9969 Braille in 1999, Deep Space 1 was retargeted to fly past the comet 19P/Borrelly on September 22, 2001. Images of the Borrelly nucleus showed it to be shaped like a bowling pin, with very rugged terrain on parts of its surface and mesa-like formations over a large area of it. Individual dust and gas jets were seen emanating from the surface, but the activity was far less than that of Halleys Comet.

The NASA Stardust mission was launched in 1999 with the goal of collecting samples of dust from the coma of Comet 81P/Wild 2. At a flyby speed of 6.1 km per second (13,600 miles per hour), the dust samples would be completely destroyed by impact with a hard collector. Therefore, Stardust used a material made of silica (sand) called aerogel that had a very low density, approaching that of air. The idea was that the aerogel would slow the dust particles without destroying them, much as a detective might shoot a bullet into a box full of cotton in order to collect the undamaged bullet. It worked, and thousands of fine dust particles were returned to Earth in 2006. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that the sample contained high-temperature materials that must have formed much closer to the Sun than where the comets formed in the outer solar system. That unexpected result meant that material in the solar nebula had been mixed, at least from the inside outward, during the formation of the planets.

Stardusts images of the nucleus of Wild 2 showed a surface that was radically different from either Halley or Borrelly. The surface appeared to be covered with large flat-floored depressions. Those were likely not impact craters, as they did not have the correct morphology and there were far too many large ones. There was some suggestion that it was a very new cometary surface on a nucleus that had not been close to the Sun before. Support for that was the fact that Wild 2 had been placed into its current orbit by a close Jupiter approach in 1974, reducing the perihelion distance to about 1.5 AU (224 million km, or 139 million miles). Before the Jupiter encounter, its perihelion was 4.9 AU (733 million km, or 455 million miles), beyond the region where water ice sublimation is significant.

In 2002 NASA launched a mission called Contour (Comet Nucleus Tour) that was to fly by Enckes Comet and 73P/Schwassman-Wachmann 3 and possibly continue on to 6P/DArrest. Unfortunately, the spacecraft structure failed when leaving Earth orbit.

In 2005 NASA launched yet another comet mission, called Deep Impact. It consisted of two spacecraft, a mother spacecraft that would fly by Comet 9P/Tempel 1 and a daughter spacecraft that would be deliberately crashed into the comet nucleus. The mother spacecraft would take images of the impact. The daughter spacecraft contained its own camera system to image the nucleus surface up to the moment of impact. To maximize the effect of the impact, the daughter spacecraft contained 360 kg (794 pounds) of solid copper. The predicted impact energy was equivalent to 4.8 tonnes of TNT.

The two spacecraft encountered Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005. The impactor produced the highest-resolution pictures of a nucleus surface ever, imaging details less than 10 metres (33 feet) in size. The mother spacecraft watched the explosion and saw a huge cloud of dust and gas emitted from the nucleus. One of the mission goals was to image the crater made by the explosion, but the dust cloud was so thick that the nucleus surface could not be seen through it. Because the mission was a flyby, the mother spacecraft could not wait around for the dust to clear.

Images of the Tempel 1 nucleus were very different from what had been seen before. The surface appeared to be old, with examples of geologic processes having occurred. There was evidence of dust flows across the nucleus surface and what appeared to be two modest-sized impact craters. There was evidence of material having been eroded away. For the first time, icy patches were discovered in some small areas of the nucleus surface.

For the first time, a mission was also able to measure the mass and density of a cometary nucleus. Typically, the nuclei are too small and their gravity too weak to affect the trajectory of the flyby spacecraft. The same was true for Tempel 1, but observations of the expanding dust cloud from the impact could be modeled so as to solve for the nucleus gravity. When combined with the volume of the nucleus as obtained from the camera images, it was shown that the Tempel 1 nucleus had a bulk density between 0.2 and 1.0 gram per cubic centimetre with a preferred value of 0.4 gram per cubic centimetre, less than half that of water ice. The measurement clearly confirmed ideas from telescopic research that comets were not very dense.

After the great success of Stardust and Deep Impact, NASA had additional plans for the spacecraft. Stardust was retargeted to go to Tempel 1 and image the crater from the Deep Impact explosion as well as more of the nucleus surface not seen on the first flyby. Deep Impact was retargeted to fly past 103P/Hartley 2, a small but very active comet.

Deep Impact, in its postimpact EPOXI mission, flew past Comet Hartley 2 on November 4, 2010. It imaged a small nucleus about 2.3 km (1.4 miles) in length and 0.9 km (0.6 mile) wide. As with Halley and Borrelly, the nucleus appeared to be two bodies stuck together, each having rough terrain but covered with very fine, smooth material at the neck where they came together. The most amazing result was that the smaller of the two bodies making up the nucleus was far more active than the larger one. The activity on the smaller body appeared to be driven by CO2 sublimationan unexpected result, given that short-period comets are expected to lose their near-surface CO2 early during their many passages close to the Sun. The other half of the nucleus was far less active and only showed evidence of water ice sublimation. The active half of the comet also appeared to be flinging baseball- to basketball-sized chunks of water ice into the coma, further enhancing the gas production from the comet as they sublimated away.

The EPOXI images also showed that the nucleus was not rotating smoothly but was in complex rotationa state where the comet nucleus rotates but the direction of the rotation pole precesses rapidly, drawing a large circle on the sky. Hartley 2 was the first encountered comet to exhibit complex rotation. It was likely driven by the very high activity from the smaller half of the nucleus, putting large torques on the nucleus rotation.

Stardust/NExT (New Exploration of Tempel 1) flew past Tempel 1 on February 14, 2011, and it imaged the spot where the Deep Impact daughter spacecraft had struck the nucleus. Some scientists believed that they saw evidence of a crater about 150 metres (500 feet) in diameter, but other scientists looked at the same images and saw no clear evidence of a crater. Some of the ambiguity was due to the fact that the Stardust camera was not as sharp as the Deep Impact cameras, and some of it was also due to the fact that sunlight was illuminating the nucleus from a different direction. The debate over whether there was a recognizable crater lingers on.

Among the new areas observed by Stardust-NeXT there was further evidence of geologic processes, including layered terrains. Using stereographic imaging, the scientists traced dust jets observed in the coma back to the nucleus surface, and they appeared to originate from some of the layered terrain. Again, the resolution of the images was not good enough to understand why the jets were coming from that area.

In 2004 ESA launched Rosetta (named after the Rosetta Stone, which had unlocked the secret of Egyptian hieroglyphics) on a trajectory to Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P). Rendezvous with 67P took place on August 6, 2014. Along the way, Rosetta successfully flew by the asteroids 2849 Steins and 21 Lutetia and obtained considerable scientific data. Rosetta uses 11 scientific instruments to study the nucleus, coma, and solar wind interaction. Unlike previous comet missions, Rosetta will orbit the nucleus until December 2015, providing a complete view of the comet as activity begins, reaches a maximum at perihelion, and then wanes. Rosetta carried a spacecraft called Philae that landed on the nucleus surface on November 12, 2014. Philae drilled into the nucleus surface to collect samples of the nucleus and analyze them in situ. As the first mission to orbit and land on a cometary nucleus, Rosetta is expected to answer many questions about the sources of cometary activity.

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