29P / Schwassmann security guard, previously called Schwassmann-Wachmann 1, is a comet magazine from Solar system, discovered on November 15, 1927 by astronomer Germans Friedrich Karl Arnold Schwassmann and Arno Arthur Wachmann at the observatory in Hamburg, Germany. This comet to be precise centaurus active. Centaurs are small bodies in the “area of giants”, among them Jupiter and Neptune, and 29P in this case has a orbit slightly eccentric (0.04) slightly beyond Jupiter (6 astronomical unit for comets, versus 5.2 astronomical units for the planet). Active, meaning sometimes a comet activity, i.e. a strand of hair and/or a such.
This comet, whose core is about 60 kilometers in diameter, is unusual: at normal times it is around size 16, but suddenly several times a year activity explosion which makes it lighter than 1 to 5 sizes (i.e. 2.5 to 100 times brighter) within a few hours, before returning to brightness usually in a week or two.
29P I have a phone activity explosion late September, surrounded by a “shell” of dust that has dispersed and dissipated, as can be seen below video posted by Terry Lovejoy on October 5th. This video shows the comet’s evolution between September 28 and October 5. In the final image, the dust cap is about 200,000 kilometers in diameter, nearly one and a half times the diameter of Jupiter.
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