List of Notable Asteroids - Numbered Minor Planets That Are Also Comets

Numbered Minor Planets That Are Also Comets

Name Cometary name Comment
2060 Chiron 95P/Chiron Discovered in 1977 as the first centaur, later found to display cometary behavior (including a coma)
4015 Wilson–Harrington 107P/Wilson–Harrington In 1992, it was realized that asteroid 1979 VA's orbit matched it with the positions of the lost comet Wilson-Harrington (1949 III)
7968 Elst–Pizarro 133P/Elst–Pizarro Discovered in 1996 as a comet, but orbitally matched to asteroid 1979 OW7
60558 Echeclus 174P/Echeclus Second centaur found to have a coma
118401 LINEAR 176P/LINEAR (LINEAR 52) Main-belt comet-asteroid discovered to have a coma on November 26, 2005

Note there are quite a few other cases where a non-numbered asteroid with only a systematic designation (such as 2001 OG108) turned out to be a comet (in this case C/2001 OG108 (LONEOS)). The above table lists only numbered asteroids that are also comets.

Read more about this topic:  List Of Notable Asteroids

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