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We present an observational and dynamical study of newly discovered main-belt comet 313P/Gibbs. We find that the object is clearly active both in observations obtained in 2014 and in precovery observations obtained in 2003 by the Sloan…
Planets in highly eccentric orbits form a class of objects not seen within our Solar System. The most extreme case known amongst these objects is the planet orbiting HD~20782, with an orbital period of 597~days and an eccentricity of 0.96.…
The latest conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn occurred at an optical distance of 6 arc minutes on 21 December 2020. We re-analysed all encounters of these two planets between -1000 and +3000 CE, as the extraordinary ones (<10$^{\prime}$)…
Thanks to the Rosetta mission, our understanding of comets has greatly improved. A very good opportunity to apply this knowledge appeared in early 2017 with the appearance of the Jupiter family comet 41P/TGK. We performed an observational…
It is speculated that some weakly active comets may be transitional objects between active and dormant comets. These objects are at a unique stage of the evolution of cometary nuclei, as they are still identifiable as active comets, in…
Until the second half of the 19th century, two or more brief appearances of bright comets, such as the ones in 1668 and 1702, alike in aspect and motion, seen with a tail near the Sun, were almost universally believed to be periodic returns…
We could accurately predict the shadow path and successfully observe an occultation of a bright star by Chiron on 2022 December 15. The Kottamia Astronomical Observatory in Egypt did not detect the occultation by the solid body, but we…
We observed 34 comets using the 24 micron camera on the Spitzer Space Telescope. Each image contains the nucleus and covers at least 10^6 km of each comet's orbit. Debris trails due to mm-sized or larger particles were found along the…
Jupiter Family Comets (JFCs), having orbital period less than 20 years, provide us with an opportunity to observe their activity and analyse the homogeneity in their coma composition over multiple apparitions. Comet 46P/Wirtanen with its…
We report results of polarimetric observations of comet 21P/Giacobini-Zinner made at phase angles, {\alpha}=76-78 deg, between 10 and 17 of September 2018, and compare them with previous measurements. We find significant variations in the…
Comet 17P/Holmes was observed for linear polarisation using the optical polarimeter mounted on the 1.2m telescope atop Gurushikhar peak near Mt. Abu during the period November-December 2007. Observations were conducted through the IHW…
The interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is only the third interstellar object to be discovered. Pre-perihelion measurements provide a unique opportunity to study its activity and composition, which may alter as it is heated in the coming months. We…
We report Spitzer Space Telescope observations of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at 5.5 and 4.3 AU from the Sun, post-aphelion. Comet 67P is the primary target of the European Space Agency's Rosetta mission. The Rosetta spacecraft will…
One of the goals of the Hubble Space Telescope program to observe periodic comet 9P/Tempel 1 in conjunction with NASA's Deep Impact mission was to study the generation and evolution of the gaseous coma resulting from the impact. For this…
We report imaging polarimetry of segments B and C of the Jupiter-family Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 in the I and H bandpasses at solar phase angles of approximately 35 and 85deg. The level of polarization was typical for active comets,…
A mysterious increase of radiocarbon 14C ca. 775 AD in the Earth's atmosphere has been recently found by Miyake et al. (Nature, 486, 240, 2012). A possible source of this event has been discussed widely, the most likely being an extreme…
Re-examination of the COBE DIRBE data reveals the thermal emission of several comet dust trails. The dust trails of 1P/Halley, 169P/NEAT, and 3200 Phaethon have not been previously reported. The known trails of 2P/Encke, and…
Previous studies have suggested that Comet 209P/LINEAR may produce strong me- teor activity on Earth on 2014 May 24; however, exact timing and activity level is difficult to estimate due to the limited physical observations of the comet.…
KIC 8462852 stood out among more than 100,000 stars in the Kepler catalogue because of the strange features of its light curve: a wide, asymmetric dimming taking up to 15 per cent of the light at D793 and a period of multiple, narrow…
We study a potential genetic relationship of comets C/1846 O1 and C/1973 D1, whose apparent orbital similarity was tested by Kresak (1982) only statistically, using the Southworth-Hawkins (1963) criterion D. Our orbit determination for…