Plot showing how Comet Elenin (C/2010 X1) comes into the planetary region on a heliocentric hyperbolic orbit and after perihelion is perturbed into an elliptical orbit that is bound to the Sun. The eccentricity drops below one in large part because of an interaction with Jupiter. A barycentric solution to the orbit shows an original orbit of ~4.1 million years with a future orbit of ~11,800 years. Incoming and outgoing you can see the affects of Jupiter's 11.8 year orbit pulling the comet back and forth. The plot was generated using an observation arc through 2011-03-25. The heliocentric solution becomes closed (e<1) on 2012-Apr-01. At that point (epoch) the comet will no longer be hyperbolic.
This screenshot either does not contain copyright-eligible parts or visuals of copyrighted software, or the author has released it under a free license (which should be indicated beneath this notice), and as such follows the licensing guidelines for screenshots of Wikimedia Commons. You may use it freely according to its particular license.
Free software license:
This work is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or any later version. This work is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See version 2 and version 3 of the GNU General Public License for more details.http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.htmlGPLGNU General Public Licensetruetrue
Note: if the screenshot shows any work that is not a direct result of the program code itself, such as a text or graphics that are not part of the program, the license for that work must be indicated separately.
{{Information
|Description = Plot showing how [[:en:C/2010 X1|Comet Elenin]] (C/2010 X1) comes into the planetary region on a heliocentric [[:en:Hyperbolic trajectory|hyperbolic orbit]] and after [[:en:Apsis|perihelion]] is [[:en:Perturbation (astronomy)|
Captions
Add a one-line explanation of what this file represents