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Next Chapter: Comets - What?

The five Ws of comets

The story of comets is one that spans the history of the Solar System, and to tell their story in full we have to consider the 'Who?', 'What?', 'Where?', 'When?' and 'Why?' of their icy nature.

Who?

Comets have held a fascination going as far back as the ancient Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, as well as Comet Halley’s guest appearance on the Bayeux Tapestry as the Normans invaded England and King Harold fell. Usually they were seen as portents of doom – Harold probably knew his time was almost up, just a few months after his coronation, when Halley began to streak through the sky. But others saw it as a sign, an opportunity, like William the Conqueror of course, who saw it as a chance to go to war and capture the throne he claimed was rightfully his. Others read religious symbols into the appearance of comets – when a bright comet outburst lit up the skies over Rome, Emperor Augustus claimed it was Caesar’s spirit ascending to the afterlife.

With the Copernican revolution and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, astronomers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries began to better understand comets, and the superstitious grip that they held over humanity began to diminish. Nevertheless, the scientific fascination that we experience today, and the sheer wonder on the odd occasion when a passing comet illuminates the night sky, still matches the supernatural fear that the ancients felt as these ‘hairy stars‘ (as the rough translation of the Latin word ‘cometes’ describes them) streaked across the stars. What would they have made of the great comets of our time, such as Hale-Bopp, Hyakutake, Holmes and McNaught?

Next Chapter: Comets - What?