16P/Brooks
Encyclopedia : 1 : 16 : 16P : 16P/Brooks
16P/Brooks, also known as Brooks 2, is a periodic comet discovered by William Robert Brooks on July 7 1889, but failed to note any motion. He was able to confirm the discovery the next morning, having seen that the comet had moved north. On August 1 1889, the famous comet hunter Edward Emerson Barnard discovered two fragments of the comet labeled "B" and "C". On August 2, he found another four or five, but these disappeared by the next day. On August 4, he observed two more objects, labeled "D" and "E". "E" disappeared by the next night and "D" was gone by the next week. Around mid-month, "B" grew large and faint, finally disappearing at the beginning of September. "C" managed to survive until mid-November 1889. No new nuclei were discovered before the apparition ended on January 13 1891.
The breakup is believed to have been caused by the passage of the comet within Jupiter's Roche limit in 1886, when it spent two days within the orbit of Io. After the discovery apparition, the comet has always been over two magnitudes fainter and no fragments have been seen since 1889.
External links
… | Previous periodic comet | | Next periodic comet | …
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.