It was dubbed The Great Comet of 1996; its passage near the Earth was one of the closest cometary approaches of the previous 200 years.
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Observations of comet C/1999 S4 (LINEAR) with the Chandra satellite in 2000 determined that X-rays observed from that comet were produced predominantly by charge exchange collisions between highly charged carbon oxygen and nitrogen minor ions in the solar wind, and neutral water, oxygen and hydrogen in the comet's coma.
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It has been proposed that cometary collisions with Earth might have supplied a large proportion of the water in the oceans, but the high D/H ratio measured in Hyakutake and other comets such as Hale–Bopp and Halley's Comet have caused problems for this theory.
Halley's Comet | comet | Comet | de Havilland Comet | The Blue Comet | Captain Comet | Sozin's Comet: The Final Battle | Silver Comet Trail | Geykido Comet Records | De Havilland Comet | Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 | Comet in Moominland | Time of the Comet | The Comet Song | Silver City Comet | PS ''Comet'' | PS Comet | Night of the Comet | Moomins and the Comet Chase | Harukichi Hyakutake | Great Comet of 1823 | Great Comet of 1811 | Great Comet of 1744 | Great Comet of 1556 | Frehley's Comet | Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 | Comet nucleus | Comet Man | Comet Lulin | Comet Kohoutek |