Comet Yang–Gao, also known as 325P/Yang–Gao, is a Jupiter-family comet with a 6.69-year orbit around the Sun. It was co-discovered by two Chinese astronomers, Yang Rui and Gao Xing.
Observational history Yang Rui and Gao Xing discovered a new object from photographic plates that Gao took from the Xingming Observatory on the night of 15 June 2009, with Yang identifying its cometary nature. Follow-up observations by Ernesto Guido and Leonid Elenin confirmed the existence of the new comet the following day, and Brian G. Marsden determined it to be a periodic comet with a 6.64-year orbit. Alexander Baransky and other astronomers at the Kyiv Observatory provided additional astrometry for the comet on July 2009.
recovered Yang–Gao on its next apparition on 11 May 2015, only 0.1 days off from Marsden's predictions in 2009. The comet later received its official numerical designation (325P) on January 2017.
In 2020, Maik Meyer and Gary W. Kronk identified a previously lost comet, X/1951 K1, as an earlier apparition of 325P/Yang–Gao, where Meyer noted that the position of X/1951 K1 was surprisingly close to the predicted position of 325P at the time. It was observed from the McDonald Observatory by Cornelis Johannes van Houten on 28 May 1951 as a diffuse 14th-magnitude object in the night sky, however it wasn't reported until March 1954, nearly three years after it was first observed.
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References
External links
at the Minor Planet Center database 325P/Yang–Gao at Seiichi Yoshida's website