Comet LINEAR, formal designation C/2012 X1, is a non-periodic comet that was observed telescopically from 2012 to 2015. It produced a powerful outburst on 21 October 2013, which raised its brightness 100 times its expected magnitude from 12 to 8.5 for several months.
Discovery and observations An asteroid-like object with an apparent magnitude of 19.4 was spotted with cometary activity from images taken by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research survey on the night of 8 December 2012. From April 2014 onwards, the comet slowly faded away as it made its way back to the outer Solar System. It was last observed from Australia as a 20th-magnitude object about 7.0 AU (1.05 billion km) from the Sun on 9 December 2015.
References
External links C/2012 X1 at the JPL Small-Body Database