168P/Hergenrother
periodic comet in the Solar System
168P/Hergenrother is a periodic comet in the Solar System. The comet, originally named P/1998 W2, returned in 2005 and got the temporary name P/2005 N2. It was last observed in January 2020 and may have continued fragmenting after the 2012 outburst.
Observational history
Discovery
On 22 November 1998, Carl W. Hergenrother spotted a new comet from CCD images taken by Timothy B. Spahr a day earlier with the Catalina Sky Survey's 0.41 m (16 in) telescope. Preliminary orbital calculations by Brian G. Marsden reveal that the comet has a periodic orbit of 6.78 years. At the time, the comet was a 17th-magnitude object within the constellation Ursa Minor.
Between 2000 and 2002, Kazuo Kinoshita and Shuichi Nakano independently used the comet's positions during its 1998 apparition to predict its next perihelion date, which is around 2 November 2005. It was successfully recovered by Australian astronomer, David Herald, on 6 November 2005.
2012 outburst
The comet came to perihelion on 1 October 2012, and was expected to reach about apparent magnitude 15.2, but due to an outburst the comet reached apparent magnitude 8. As a result of the outburst of gas and dust, the comet was briefly more than 500 times brighter than it would have been without the outburst.
The public source identifies “168P/Hergenrother” as periodic comet in the Solar System. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around 168P, Hergenrother and periodic.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3272131. The first chronological checks are 1998, 2005, 2020 and 2012.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “168P/Hergenrother” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.