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The Roman numbering system arose with the very first discovery of natural satellites other than Earth's: Galileo referred to the Galilean moons as I through IV (counting from Jupiter outward), in part to spite his rival Simon Marius, who had proposed the names now adopted, after his own proposal to name the bodies after members of the Medici ...
After Edmond Halley demonstrated that the comets of 1531, 1607, and 1682 were the same body and successfully predicted its return in 1759, that comet became known as Halley's Comet. [1] Similarly, the second and third known periodic comets, Encke's Comet [ 2 ] and Biela's Comet , [ 3 ] were named after the astronomers who calculated their ...
A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing.This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or coma surrounding the nucleus, and sometimes a tail of gas and dust gas blown out from the coma.
Some of these bodies have exactly the same name, referring to the same mythological character. The earliest such conflicts possibly arose through not considering certain mythological names as "official"; for instance, the names Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto for the Galilean satellites of Jupiter were not used in astronomical literature of a certain era, their place being taken by Jupiter I ...
Even after Johannes Kepler had determined in 1609 that the planets moved about the Sun in elliptical orbits, he was reluctant to believe that the laws that governed the motions of the planets should also influence the motion of other bodies; he believed that comets travel among the planets along straight lines, and it required Edmond Halley to ...
Mesopotamia's image of the world, following the path Gilgamesh takes in the Epic of Gilgamesh. Ancient Near Eastern (ANE) cosmology refers to the plurality of cosmological beliefs in the Ancient Near East, covering the period from the 4th millennium BC to the formation of the Macedonian Empire by Alexander the Great in the second half of the 1st millennium BC.
A few minor planets are named after exotic entities such as supercomputers or have an unknown origin. The first few thousand minor planets have all been named, with the near-Earth asteroid (4596) 1981 QB currently being the lowest-numbered unnamed minor planet. [2] The first 3 pages in the below table contain 1,000 named entries each.
Non-periodic Shoemaker–Levy comets are interleaved in this sequence: C/1991 B1 between 2 and 3, C/1991 T2 between 5 and 6, C/1993 K1 and C/1994 E2 after Shoemaker–Levy 9. In comet nomenclature, the letter before the "/" is either "C" (a non-periodic comet), "P" (a periodic comet), "D" (a comet that has been lost or has disintegrated), "X ...