Explore · 21 entities

Comets

Icy visitors that grow tails near the Sun.

#

1

Comet
67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko
A periodic comet orbited and landed on by ESA's Rosetta mission.

B

1

Comet
Borrelly
Periodic comet — 19P/Borrelly.

C

5

Comet
Comet Hale–Bopp
A long-period comet that was widely visible to the naked eye in 1997.
Comet
Comet Hyakutake
A comet that passed very close to Earth in 1996.
Comet
Comet NEOWISE
A long-period comet discovered in 2020 that became a bright naked-eye object in the Northern Hemisphere sky.
Comet
Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9
A comet that broke apart and collided with Jupiter in 1994.
Comet
Comet Swift–Tuttle
A periodic comet (109P/Swift–Tuttle) that is the parent body of the Perseid meteor shower.

E

1

Comet
Encke
The comet with the shortest known orbital period (about 3.3 years) and the parent of the Taurid meteor stream.

G

2

H

2

I

1

Comet
Ikeya–Seki
One of the brightest comets of the past thousand years — a Kreutz sungrazer that became visible in daylight near the Sun in October 1965.

L

1

Comet
Lovejoy
A Kreutz sungrazing comet that unexpectedly survived a passage through the Sun's corona in December 2011, emerging to display a bright tail.

M

1

Comet
McNaught
The 'Great Comet of 2007', the brightest comet in decades, whose vast fanned dust tail was a spectacular sight from the Southern Hemisphere.

S

2

T

3

W

1

Comet
Wild 2
Periodic comet — 81P/Wild.