If an interstellar comet were to encounter the solar system from interstellar space, it would pursue a hyperbolic orbit around the Sun. To date, no such comet with an original hyperbolic orbit has bee...If an interstellar comet were to encounter the solar system from interstellar space, it would pursue a hyperbolic orbit around the Sun. To date, no such comet with an original hyperbolic orbit has been found, although there is no particular reason why we might not find one some night. However, a comet with a near-parabolic orbit from the Oort belt may approach Jupiter on its way in to the inner solar system, and its orbit may be perturbed into a hyperbolic orbit.
This amounts to just a name change, although some authors treat \(a\) for a hyperbola as a negative number, because some of the formulas, for example for the speed in an orbit, \(V^2 = GM \left( \frac...This amounts to just a name change, although some authors treat \(a\) for a hyperbola as a negative number, because some of the formulas, for example for the speed in an orbit, \(V^2 = GM \left( \frac{2}{r} - \frac{1}{a} \right)\), are then identical for an ellipse and for a hyperbola.
