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‘Round the Sun an elliptical orbit it rides,īack and forth every seventy-six years anew. It’d been here before and it’d be back soon, too: Of comets and showed that – beyond any doubt – Such as Edmond Halley who studied the movements There’s a number of comets that got named after humans,Īt times after scientists who figured stuff out: Such as the Great Comet of sixteen-eighteen. That are simply named after the year they rolled in,Įspecially those that have made a big blast When I tell you that comets get more than one name.įirst of all, there’s the comets from centuries past, You may think astronomers are peculiar creatures The Naming of Comets is a complex procedure, Hopefully it’ll turn out handy to some of you readers, too – or at least, I hope it’ll make you smile. It did help me a lot remember the names of a comet or two. Goes without saying that I couldn’t resist the urge to jot down a few rhymes myself. Eliot’s poem, The Naming of Cats where he describes in ever great detail the complex and mysterious matter surrounding how cat are assigned a name and how they get to pick their own designation, too.
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And while delving into this complex tangle of names and figures, I couldn’t but think of T. So I finally decided to hit the books and learn, once and for all, how and why comets are named the way they are. Was Comet McNaught-Hughes brighter than Comet McNaught-Russell? And which one was discovered first, Swift-Tuttle or Tempel-Tuttle?įortunately, these name-tags also come with a bunch of numbers to help us poor forgetful minds navigate through the intricate jungle that is the nomenclature of comets. Hats off to all of them, of course! Incidentally, though, this causes many comets to have very similar names, and hugely complicates the task of those who, like me, struggle to keep track of them. Many comet hunters, present and past, are extremely prolific and discovered way more than one comet each. Think of last year’s famous sungrazer, Comet ISON, which was named after the International Scientific Optical Network (the survey programme within which its discoverers, Russian astronomers Vitali Nevski and Artyom Novinchonok, worked). Occasionally, a comet’s name nowadays may refer not to the individuals who first spotted it in the sky, but – slightly less charmingly – to the observing programme they were working on. But what about the rest of the name? The P stands for ‘periodic’ comet – in this case, the period is about six and a half years – while the number is there to tell us a bit of history, because this was the 67th periodic comet to have been discovered.Ĭomet ISON at 15:42 UT on 28 November 2013, as seen in SOHO’s LASCO C2 field of view. This is, for example, the case of our beloved 67P/C-G, which is named after Klim Churyumov and Svetlana Gerasimenko, the two Ukrainian astronomers who discovered it in 1969.
#Comet names professional
With a different name, of course! For good reasons, these names usually acknowledge the astronomer(s) – professional and amateur alike – who discovered the comet in the first place.
#Comet names series
When you read about a particular comet on a scientific publication, its name is just a series of digits, but then – bang! – a comet visits our skies and it’s all over the news. Actually, their naming convention may be even more elaborate than those used for other astronomical objects. Astronomers are nasty when it comes to designate our stars, planets and galaxies, and comets are no exception. But why is it called this? In fact, what’s the origin of any comet’s name?Įven as an astronomer, I’ve always struggled with the protocols used to name, classify and identify any type of celestial body. 67P/C-G will work too, especially if you’re in a hurry. It took us a while but we finally all succeeded and memorised the name of Rosetta’s comet: 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Close-up view of comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko on 30 April 2014.