Amateurs have been discovering comets for many centuries. The odds are staggering. Regardless of these suspicions, there are some other much more interesting facts about this little group of comets. They titled these comets A through F. Fragments A and D have seemed to be the brightest or the largest, depending upon who you talk to. Whenever the subject of comets comes up, most people think of a comet as one big dirty snowball.
Comets can and do break up into pieces.
The first category are those comets that have been supposedly torn apart by the gravity of a planet. They call these tidal forces. This is a very important concept to remember when trying to understand comets. There seems to have been an ongoing battle between Marsden and Sekanina on the one hand and others such as Don Yeomans of JPL and Hal Weaver of Hubble Telescope fame on the other. Marsden and Yeomans you will remember went at it recently over the possible impact of an asteroid some decades in the future when Marsden announced a possible impact apparently before those in control thought he should have.