When will the next comet come around?

Question

I am doing a report on comets for my eighth grade science class and I was wondering when the next cometr will come. It can be any one. Whoever has the right answer first will be awarded best answer. Thank you very much, I would greatly appreciate the information.

Answer 1

There are fewer than 200 comets known in predictable orbits, and except for Halley, which will be back in 2061, none of them are naked-eye objects. Bright comets come from the Oort cloud, a trip that takes them a thousand years or more, and are always a surprise, though the big ones are apt to be discovered a couple of years before they become visible to the naked eye.

There are always comets to be seen, but most of them require a telescope.

Answer 2

Here's an article that should help! :)

A Hot New Comet
For 12 years the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory — SOHO for short — has stared at the Sun at visible, ultraviolet, and X-ray wavelengths. This is not a particularly safe practice for human eyes, of course, but the spacecraft's sensors can handle all those high-energy photons just fine. A joint project of the European Space Agency and NASA, SOHO has been there to sound the alarm whenever our star erupts and spews huge blobs of magnetized, superheated plasma in Earth's general direction.

But all this time SOHO has been moonlighting as a comet catcher, netting astronomers some 1,350 discoveries. To date, they've all been kamikaze comets — "sungrazers" that race in close and vaporize themselves in a matter of days.


Comet SOHO (P/2007 R5), first spotted in 1999 and 2003, was predicted to make a third pass near the Sun in September 2007 — and it did. Curiously, it exhibits no coma or tail. Click on image for a larger view.
ESA / NASA / SOHO ConsortiumSOHO's latest find is different: it's a repeat visitor first seen in September 1999, and then again in September 2003. Two years ago a German graduate student named Sebastian Hö*** realized that the two objects had nearly identical four-year orbits and thus were probably one and the same. He predicted that it would make an encore appearance on September 11th, and it did.

Although Hö*** did the spade work, he doesn't get the naming rights. Neither do Terry Lovejoy, the Australian who first spotted the comet in SOHO imagery in 1999; Kazimieras Cernis (Lithuania, 2003); or Bo Zhou (China, 2007). Instead, this new periodic visitor will henceforth be known as Comet SOHO (P/2007 R5). Hey, don't blame me — take it up with the IAU.

You can read more about the discovery at the SOHO website. And if you want to start discovering SOHO comets of your own, just click here every few hours.


P.S. My nickname's Ari, short for Arizona... :D

Answer 3

They orbit around the sunlight, yet they have rather wonky orbits. instead of going around and around in a circle, they whizz in from the outer reaches of the photograph voltaic device, zoom ideal around the sunlight, then whizz returned out returned. They save on with those oval-shaped (or eliptical) orbits. it rather is why they arrive in basic terms each and every 70 or one hundred fifty or one thousand years. It relies upon how extensive their oval course is, and how long it takes them to holiday alongside it. i assume you will desire to analyze it to a soccer field surrounded via a race track. Planet earth in basic terms walks around and around between the goals. however the comet is going around and around the racetrack, so various the time its a techniques, a techniques away on the different end of the sphere.

Answer 4

There are always a number of comets in the sky; they just aren't particularly bright and probably need a good telescope to be seen:
http://www.skyhound.com/sh/skyhound.html

Bright comets usually come upon us suddenly and unexpectedly, so they can't really be predicted.

Answer 5

Next time I clean your sink.

Answer 6

Why don't you read this?

http://www.space.com/media/pdf/predicting_bright_comet.pdf