Word: comets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Even now it is hurtling closer, racing toward a year-end rendezvous with the sun. By December it will be the brightest object in the predawn sky, providing early risers with an unusual celestial display. The newly discovered comet may eventually be 50 times as brilliant as Halley's comet, which last dazzled the world in 1910; its tail could arc across some 30°-or one-sixth-of the evening sky. With no effort at hyperbole, Harvard Astronomer Fred Whipple says the onrushing giant "may well be the comet of the century...
...great comet was discovered in March by Czech-born Astronomer Luboš Kohoutek while he was looking for asteroids with the Hamburg Observatory's 31-in. Schmidt telescope; at that time it was some 480 million miles away from the sun, or roughly in the vicinity of the orbit of Jupiter. In contrast, Halley's comet-less bright than Kohoutek's-was not spotted until it was about 170 million miles closer to the sun. Although the nucleus of a typical comet (which is thought to be composed of frozen water, methane and ammonia, as well...
Although the comet is now visible only as a speck of light in telescopes, solar radiation will boil off gases and dust from the nucleus as it approaches closer to the sun. In the "solar wind," the stream of electrically charged particles that continually emanate from the sun, the material from the nucleus should be swept into the characteristic comet's tail. As it reacts with the charged particles, the tail should begin to glow brightly-so brightly, in fact, that Brian Marsden of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory believes that the comet could be visible to the naked...
Hundreds of observers around the world are preparing to examine the comet in many frequencies of light -from ultraviolet to infrared. Harvard's A. Edward Lilley even hopes to detect, for the first time, microwave emissions from a comet. Above the earth's obscuring blanket of air unmanned satellites-perhaps even Skylab's sophisticated observatory-may make the most fruitful observations of all. All the observations will be aimed at determining the structure of the comet and its origin-probably beyond the planet Pluto, where billions of comet-like objects are believed to be orbiting as remnants...
...comes to aesthetic caliber, the argument that all things dramatic are invariably ordered better in London than in New York City seems to contain as much myth as substance. British theater is often more impressive in bounty than in boldness, more remarkable for its solid reliability than for any comet flights of dramatic excitement. Herewith a sampler of the current season...