78P/Gehrels
Sign in to save78P/Gehrels, also known as Gehrels 2, is a Jupiter-family comet with a current orbital period of 7.22 years. It is the second periodic comet discovered by American astronomer, Tom Gehrels.
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Within Vinony's link graph, 78P/Gehrels is referenced by 725 other articles, and connects out to comet, apsis and C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE).
It is catalogued under topics including Astronomical objects discovered in 1973, Comets in 2012 and Comets in 2019.
Its subject is documented across 9 Wikipedia language editions.
Wikidata facts
- Instance of
- Jupiter-family comet
- Parent body
- Sun
- Orbital period
- 2638.019263116993
- Image
- 78P 2019-01-27 image ZTF-sso-446-zr-fov-5.6arcmin.png
Show 15 more facts
- discoverer or inventor
- Tom Gehrels
- location of discovery
- Lunar and Planetary Laboratory
- time of discovery or invention
- 1973-09-29
- provisional designation
- 1973n
- absolute magnitude
- 9.0
- epoch
- November 26, 2014
- orbital eccentricity
- 0.461637372748463
- semi-major axis of an orbit
- 3.73639707776845
- periapsis
- 2.011536547242388
- apoapsis
- 5.461257608294511
- orbital inclination
- 6.252696505134401
- longitude of ascending node
- 210.5626757533421
- argument of periapsis
- 192.7558599464267
- mean anomaly
- 143.1385388526563
- time of periapsis
- 2455938.604936701
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Encyclopedic overview
5 sectionsContents
- Observational history
- Physical characteristics
- Orbit
- References
- External links
78P/Gehrels, also known as Gehrels 2, is a Jupiter-family comet with a current orbital period of 7.22 years. It is the second periodic comet discovered by American astronomer, Tom Gehrels.
== Observational history == It was discovered by Tom Gehrels on photographic plates exposed between 29 September and 5 October 1973 at the Palomar Observatory. It had a brightness of apparent magnitude of 15. Brian G. Marsden computed the parabolic and elliptical orbits which suggested an orbital period of 8.76 years, later revising the data to give a perihelion date of 30 November 1963 and orbital period of 7.93 years.
Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “78P/Gehrels” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.