A 'Tail' of Two Comets
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/aster...0160318-16.jpg
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.ph...mets20 160318


Comet P/2016 BA14 was discovered on Jan. 22, 2016, by the University
of Hawaii's PanSTARRS telescope on Haleakala, on the island of Maui.
It was initially thought to be an asteroid, but follow-up
observations by a University of Maryland and Lowell Observatory team
with the Discovery Channel Telescope showed a faint tail, revealing
that the discovery was, in fact, a comet. The orbit of this newly
discovered comet, however, held yet another surprise. Comet P/2016
BA14 follows an unusually similar orbit to that of comet 252P/LINEAR,
which was discovered by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's
Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) survey on April 7,
2000. The apparent coincidence may be an indication of twin nature in
that comet. P/2016 BA14 is roughly half the size of comet
?252P/LINEAR and might be a fragment that calved off sometime in the
larger comet's past.

"Comet P/2016 BA14 is possibly a fragment of 252P/LINEAR. The two
could be related because their orbits are so remarkably similar,"
said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center of NEO Studies (CNEOS) at
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "We know
comets are relatively fragile things, as in 1993 when comet
Shoemaker-Levy 9 was discovered and its pieces linked to a flyby of
Jupiter. Perhaps during a previous pass through the inner-solar
system, or during a distant flyby of Jupiter, a chunk that we now
know of as BA14 might have broken off of 252P."



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