C/2006 M4 (SWAN) is a non-periodic comet discovered in late June 2006 by Robert D. Matson of Irvine, California and Michael Mattiazzo of Adelaide, South Australia in publicly available images of the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). These images were captured by the Solar Wind ANisotropies (SWAN) Lyman-alpha all-sky camera on board the SOHO. The comet was officially announced after a ground-based confirmation by Robert McNaught (Siding Spring Survey) on July 12.
Although perihelion was reached on 28 September 2006, the comet flared dramatically from an outburst, resulting in its apparent magnitude to increase from 7.0 to 4.0 on 24 October 2006, becoming visible with the naked eye.
Orbit
Comet C/2006 M4 is in a hyperbolic trajectory (with an osculating eccentricity larger than 1) during its passage through the inner Solar System. After leaving the influence of the planets, the eccentricity will drop below 1 and it will remain bound to the Solar System as an Oort cloud comet.
Given the extreme orbital eccentricity of this object, different epochs can generate quite different heliocentric unperturbed two-body best-fit solutions to the aphelion distance of this object. For objects at such high eccentricity, the Suns barycentric coordinates are more stable than heliocentric coordinates. Using JPL Horizons, the barycentric orbital elements for epoch 2013-May-14 generate a semi-major axis of about 1,300 AU (190 billion km) and a period of about 48,000 years.
References
External links
- C/2006 M4 at the JPL Small-Body Database
- C/2006 M4 ( SWAN ) @ Seiichi Yoshida (September 21, 2007)
