C/2002 VQ94 (LINEAR)

Background

C/2002 VQ94 was discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project on 11 November 2002. Precovery images from October 2001, when the comet was 11.7 AU (1.75 billion km) from the Sun, are known. Cometary activity was first detected at the end of August 2003, when the comet was 8.8 AU (1.32 billion km) from the Sun. The comet only brightened to total apparent magnitude 15.7 because its perihelion point of 6.7 AU (1.00 billion km) was outside the inner Solar System.

The orbit of this long-period comet has been well determined from an observation arc of 9.5 years. Inbound, at an epoch of 1950, the barycentric orbital period was 2,597 years with an aphelion of 371 AU from the Sun. Outbound, at an epoch of 2050, the period is approximately 2,521 years with an aphelion distance of 364 AU. These values are calculated with respect to the center of mass of the Solar System after leaving the planetary region.

Despite its large nucleus—comparable to that of C/1729 P1 (Sarabat), which was visible to the naked eye as it passed 4 AU from the Sun—C/2002 VQ94 remained far too distant for naked-eye visibility. Other large comets such as 95P/Chiron (≈200 km) and C/2014 UN271 (≈150 km) similarly stay outside the inner Solar System and do not become visible to the naked eye. By contrast, Comet Hale–Bopp, with a nucleus about 60 km in diameter, came within 1 AU of the Sun.