How slow will comet Hale-Bopp be traveling when it is farthest from the Sun?

The maximum distance scales with the orbital period as Kepler's Third Law so that relative to an Earth year, and the Earth-Sun distance, if the period of Hale-Bopp is about 4000 years or so, then (4000)^(2/3) = 240 Astronomical Units. The velocity ( circular) scales as the inverse square root of the distance, so for V(earth) = 30 km/s at 1 Astronomical Unit, for 240 Astronomical Units, the velocity is about 2 kilometers/sec. That would be my guess as to the velocity of Hale-Bopp at its farthest distance from the Sun to within a factor of two.


Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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