Mark Twain said he “...came in with Haley’s Comet, and will go out with Haley’s Comet.”
He did (1835), and did (1910).
“The first comet was observed long ago around 500 B.C. by a Greek philosophers. ”
Because no one ever lived before 500 bc that wasn’t blind 🤪
Halley’s is greatly reduced in size from when it first began to be observed. In another few turns it’ll be more like “Halley’s meteor shower.”
Maybe the first recorded comet observation was written down by Greeks, but cave men and others before them certainly saw comets.
I think comets go faster than 2000mph. A lot faster.
One of my teachers in grade school recalled a huge scare (it must have been in 1910) because supposedly the earth was going to pass through the tail of the comet. Some folks thought it would be the end of the world. There were songs written about it.
Care to move it to college level?
There are 3 fact in this old jingle.
Comet, it makes your teeth turn green,
Comet, it tastes like gasoline.
Comet, it makes you vomit,
So get some Comet and vomit today!
I’d dispute the point on “observations”. The Chinese have records going back to at least 600 BC of comet observations. It is likely that recorded observations go even further back, since the sky was constantly observed by many ancient cultures that predate the Greeks by millennia.
Granted that comets were poorly understood, and even the Greeks didn’t really know what they were. It does seem that the Greeks attempted some of the first *Formal* observations of them as actual phenomena rather than as just one more thing in the sky.
Comets are normally very shy, but wheel out a karaoke machine and wow!
Halley’s Comet, named for Edmond Halley [1656-1742], was the first ‘predicted’ comet (by Halley in 1705) based upon Sir Isaac Newton’s seminal 1687 Principia Mathematica where he formulated the first mathematical descriptions of gravity. As a ‘short period’ comet its furthest out-bound point (aphelion) is 35 AUs, beyond Neptune, while its perihelion is 0.6AU, between Mercury & Venus.
With a first record of it in 240BC, it was not until Halley, that the thought became firm that these 74-79 year appearances were of the same object. He used the appearance of 1682 to predict its return in 1758. While he died before this return, this was the 1st modeled prediction, based upon Newton’s work, that was proof of validity.
Factoids: Comets usually have 2 tails, one of dust, that is curved as it tracks the orbit, and one of ionized gas, that is blown out by the prevailing solar wind and solar magnetosphere. The more times a short-period comet (~200 years) makes its orbital pass, the less spectacular it is as these volatiles get exhausted. Long period comets are speculated to derive from the very distant Oort Cloud (20k+ AU) which means any orbital period for them can run into thousands of years.
Comet
It’ll make your teeth turn green
Comet
It tastes like gasoline
Comet
It’ll make you vomit
So get some Comet, and vomit, today!
“...closer to the sun a comet may travel at over 100,000 miles per hour.”