In 2007, the coma of comet 17P/Holmes briefly became larger than the sun.
family comet and there are hundreds such comets but none of these has ever done this. There must be something different about this one."
Jupiter family comets orbit the sun in elliptical orbits with the farthest points between the orbits ofand Jupiter and the nearest point close to the star. They usually complete one orbit in about 20 years, brightening up everytime they warm up closer to the sun.
But 17P/Holmes doesn't follow this pattern, which, Nissinen says, suggests that the comet might have a different chemical composition than all those other Jupiter-family comets known. Maria Gritsevich, a planetary scientist at the University of Helsinki in Finland, who co-authored several studies about comet 17P/Holmes with Nissinen, told Space.com that strangely, the comet doesn't produce the outbursts during every visit into the central solar system.
"[These outbursts] always appear when the comet passes a short distance from the sun, so it seems to be heat-related," Gritsevich said."But the outbursts don't seem to be periodical. They are rather random."
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