Comets

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Comet Summary

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Comets

A bright comet is a spectacular astronomical event. Throughout history, comets have left a strong impression on those who have witnessed their appearances. The name comes from the Greek kometes, meaning "the long-haired one." Ancient Greeks thought comets to be atmospheric phenomena, part of the "imperfect" changeable Earth, not of the "perfect" immutable heavens. Today we know they are "icy conglomerates," as proposed in 1950 by Fred Whipple—that is, chunks of ice and dust left over from the formation of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.

Comets are among the most primitive bodies in the solar system. Because of their orbits and small sizes, comets have undergone relatively little processing, unlike larger bodies, such as the Moon and Earth, which have been modified considerably since they formed. The chemical composition of comets contains a wealth of information about their origin and evolution as well as the origin and evolution of the solar system. Hence, comets are often called cosmic fossils.

When a comet is far from the Sun, it is an inert icy body. As it approaches the Sun, heat causes ices in the nucleus to sublimate, creating a cloud of gas and dust known as the coma. Sunlight and solar wind will push the coma gas and dust away from the Sun creating two tails. The dust tail is generally curved and appears yellowish because the dust particles are scattering sunlight. The gas (or ion) tail is generally straight and it appears bluebecause its light is dominated by emission from carbon monoxide ions. The appearance of comets in photographs can give the erroneous impression that they streak through the night sky like a meteor or a shooting star. In fact, comets move slowly from night to night with respect to the stars and can sometimes be visible for many weeks, as was the case with comet Hale-Bopp in 1997 and with comet Halley during its 1985-1986 appearance.

Edmund Halley was an eighteenth-century British astronomer who first calculated the orbit of comets. The most famous comet, Halley, is named after him.

Comet Halley is not the brightest comet, but it is the most famous, mainly because it is the brightest of the predictable comets. It was named after Edmund Halley, an eighteenth-century British astronomer who was the first to calculate the orbits of comets. Comet Halley's orbit has an average period of seventy-six years. Its closest approach to the Sun (perihelion) is between the orbits of Venus and Mercury (0.59 astronomical units), and its aphelion (farthest distance from the Sun) is at 35 AU, beyond Neptune's orbit. The orbit has an inclination of 162 degrees with respect to the ecliptic. This means that comet Halley orbits the Sun clockwise when seen from the north, whereas Earth orbits the Sun counterclockwise.

The study of comets is a very active field of science. In 1986 a flotilla of spacecraft were used to study comet Halley. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, several spacecraft are scheduled to be launched to encounter and study a number of comets. In addition to space-based studies, ground-based observations of comets have yielded a wealth of information.

The Comet's Nucleus

All of the activity in a comet originates in its nucleus, which is composed of roughly equal amounts of ices and dust. Water ice is the most abundant of the ices, comprising about 80 percent of the total. So far, only the nuclei of comets Halley and Borrelly have been imaged in detail. Comet Halley turned out to be larger, darker, and less spherical than expected by most astronomers. The images of comet Borrelly's nucleus obtained in September 2001 by NASA's Deep Space 1 spacecraft show considerable similarity with those of comet Halley. Halley's nucleus is peanut-shaped, approximately 18 kilometers (11 miles) long and 8 kilometers (5 miles) wide. The reflectivity (or albedo) is 4 percent, which is as dark as coal. The size, albedo, and approximate shape of several other cometary nuclei have been determined. Comet Halley's nucleus seems to be typical among comets with relatively short orbital periods, and there are much larger nuclei such as that of comet Hale-Bopp. So far, the cometary nuclei studied in detail appear to have most of their surface covered by an inert mantle or crust. The active (exposed ice) fraction of their surface is small; in comet Halley, this fraction is somewhere between 15 and 30 percent.

The development of a crust can suppress the activity of cometary nuclei and give them an asteroidal appearance. The best example to date is comet Wilson-Harrington, which was discovered in 1949 and was lost until it was rediscovered as an inert object and given the asteroid number 4015. The behavior of this object has added credence to the long-held expectation that some Earth-crossing asteroids are extinct or dormant comet nuclei.

The Composition of Comets

The composition of cometary nuclei is primarily inferred from studies of the coma components, namely gas, plasma (ions), and dust. So far, twentyfourdifferent molecules have been identified in comets, ten of which were discovered in comet Hale-Bopp. The molecules observed in comets and their relative abundances are very similar to those observed in dense interstellar molecular cloud cores, which is the environment where star formation occurs. Thus, it appears that comets underwent little processing in the solar nebula and they preserve a good record of its original composition.

Comet Hale-Bopp (seen in the center) was visible from Earth for several weeks in 1997. Comets travel at a relatively slow rate although they give the appearance of streaking through the sky.

Information on the composition of cometary dust particles was scarce before 1986. Studies of the dust in comet Halley and other comets confirmed that some of the grains are silicates, more specifically crystalline olivine (Mg, Fe)₂ SiO₄ and pyroxene (Mg, Fe, Ca) SiO₃. Another major component of the dust in comet Halley was organic dust. These small solid particles were discovered by the visiting spacecraft and were called "CHON" because they were composed almost exclusively of the elements carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen.

The Origins of Comets

Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort noted in 1950 that the source of new comets was a shell located between 20,000 and 100,000 AU from the Sun. The existence of the Oort cloud is now widely accepted. Astronomers believe that comets in the Oort cloud formed near Uranus and Neptune and were gravitationally scattered by these two planets into their current location. In addition to the Oort cloud, there is another reservoir that was proposed in 1951 by Dutch-born American astronomer Gerard Peter Kuiper as a ring of icy bodies beyond Pluto's orbit. This Kuiper belt is considered to be the main source of Jupiter-family comets, which are those with low-inclination and short-period orbits.

Comet-Planet Collisions

Many comets are in Earth-crossing orbits and collisions do occur between comets and planets. A spectacular example of such a collision was the impact of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 with Jupiter in July 1994. It is now well established that an impact with an asteroid or comet created a large crater at the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago. Known as the Chicxulub impact, this event almost certainly caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. Efforts are underway to study the population of potential hazards from both comets and asteroids in sufficient detail to predict and prevent future large impacts.