Word: bopp
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Within a few days, Green and Marsden had calculated that Hale-Bopp was incredibly far away and must therefore be unusually bright. At this rate, they determined, it should be absolutely brilliant when it finally arrived in March 1997. Should was the operative word, however. Comets are not especially well-behaved creatures. All too often they show great promise early in their career but turn out--like the infamous Kohoutek in the early 1970s--to be celestial duds...
...this may come as news to most of us, but astronomers, amateur and professional alike, have been buzzing about Hale-Bopp ever since its discovery nearly two years ago. At that point the comet was more than half a billion miles from the sun, well beyond the orbit of Jupiter, and invisible without a telescope. But not necessarily a huge telescope: like most comets, this one was found by a pair of amateurs as familiar with their favorite regions of the sky as most people are with their own neighborhoods...
...hundred miles away, in Stanfield, Arizona, Thomas Bopp was going through a similar exercise at almost precisely the same time. Bopp is a supervisor at a construction-materials company and, like Hale, a longtime amateur astronomer. He too saw the intruder and sent his own E-mail to the bureau. Thanks to their nearly simultaneous discoveries, Hale and Bopp share the honor of giving the comet their names...
This cloud, which can grow to thousands of miles across, is the comet's head, the light-reflecting shroud that turns an otherwise insignificant iceberg into a brilliant object. Just how brilliant depends on many factors. The solid comet's size is one, and Hale-Bopp, an estimated 20 miles across, is bigger than most. (Halley's was less than half as large.) Its history is another. Out in deep space, a comet can get encrusted with a layer of gummy dust. This layer can seal in most of the ice and prevent it from vaporizing. Some gas may spurt...
...didn't. Hale-Bopp has steadily grown in brightness, giving amateur astronomers an increasingly satisfying show. Professional astronomers too have been watching Hale-Bopp, and not always with detachment. "We're delirious," says Tobias Owen of the University of Hawaii. "It's been 20 years since a really bright comet came by, and now, within just a year, we've had Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp...