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The long-term evolution and initial size of comets 46P/Wirtanen and 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko

Lamy, P. L.; Groussin, O.; Hahn, G. +2 more

We present a new method to study the long-term evolution of cometary nuclei in order to estimate their original size, and we consider the case of comets 46P/Wirtanen (hereafter 46P) and 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (hereafter 67P). We calculate the past evolution of the orbital elements of both comets over 100000yr using a Bulirsch-Stoer integrator a…