Lydia's Homepage

Comets a research report by Lydia Gordon Astronomy and Cosmologies, Spring 99 with E.J. Zita

I have investigated comets by reading modern scientific literature about it, observing it, and researching how European societies understood it.

What is a comet? A comet is nothing more than a dirty snowball formed from dust clouds within galaxies. In 1950, John Oort came up with the idea that the Oort cloud was the creator of essentially the whole comet population. The cloud is believed to claim anywhere from 10^25-10^27 comets total. (Chapman, p164). When a comet passes close to the sun in its orbital path, the ice sublimates creating a nucleus, which in turn forms a long beautiful tail . The orbital path consists of three eccentricities, the ellipse, parabola, and the hyperbola.(Chapman, pp46-49) These unique astronomical bodies act as natural space barometers and have provided reliable indications of the day to day strength of the sun's particle emissions (Brown, p.11)

Observations of the stars, particularly comet C/1998 M5 (Linear). There is a path across the night's sky trailing at this moment by the tail of Ursa Major. Did I find this tailess comet? Apparently I did not. I did get some observations of the stars around that area jotted down though. The Comet C/1998 M5 (Linear) at this moment has around a magnitude of approximatly 13. The lowest magnitude that it showed was around the beginning of March, and even that was a 9. Check out the link, it has all the information that I could not produce on my own.

While the Chinese scientifically graphed each comet's passing, the European societies have watched comets with both fear and admiration. To them, comets were the portenders of plague, war, famine, and the deaths of notables. Even the word disaster is composed of two latin words that codemn comets: dis meaning evil, and aster meaning star(Comets in History). Julius Ceasar, Attila, Emperor Valentinian, and Charlemagne were all said to have been transported to the heavens by a passing comet. In 77 A.D, Pliny wrote, "A comet is a particularly frightful body, and not easily atoned, it is usually a very fearful star and announces no small effusion of blood. " (Brown, pp.15-21). It wasn't until well in the 1500's that European astronomers started theorizing the true scientific aspects of comets.