Jakarta (ANTARA) – BEIJING, March 8 (Xinhua) — Chinese astronomers made a new discovery regarding the activity of the first two comets discovered by the country, according to the Purple Mountain Observatory (PMO) under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. of Sciences).
The two comets, designated 62P/Tsuchinshan 1 and 60P/Tsuchinshan 2, were discovered by the PMO in January 1965 and confirmed as new short-period comets after being reported to the Minor Planet Center of the International Astronomical Union. .
A research team from PMO observed 60P/Tsuchinshan 2 from November 2018 to March 2019 using high-precision telescopes and discovered a spiral structure within the coma, according to a research paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.
As a Jupiter family comet, it is highly active compared to other comets of its kind at a similar heliocentric distance, and peak activity occurs about 10 days after perihelion, the paper said.
The research team derived key activity parameters for the two comets by collecting 850 observations of 60P/Tsuchinshan 2 and 471 observations of 62P/Tsuchinshan 1 over a period of more than 20 years.
They found that the activity of the two comets increased as the perihelion distance decreased due to Jupiter’s gravitational perturbation, according to another paper by the team published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
