Word: comets
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Chicago, they were talking about "Haley's comet." To Atlanta TV Executive Neil Kuvin, it was "Super Bowl every night." In New York, Executive Director Vernon Jordan of the National Urban League called it "the single most spectacular educational experience in race relations in America...
...that he had earned only 15,982 francs and 60 centimes from more than two decades of scribbling. The reigning critic of the day, Sainte-Beuve, referred to Baudelaire as a translator and journalist rather than a poet. Small wonder the writer identified himself with that other 19th century comet, Edgar Allan Poe ("not a kindred spirit but a twin"), whose work he introduced to France. Indeed, Baudelaire made more money from his Poe translations than from his own poems, essays of self-scrutiny (Intimate Journals) and art criticism (The Painter of Modern Life...
...believers have pondered the story of the star of Bethlehem. Did some celestial display actually mark Jesus birth, or is the biblical reference merely figurative? Did a new star really appear in the heavens? Could it have been what contemporary astronomers call a supernova, or exploding star? A comet? Or might the "star" really have been a juxtaposition of two of the brighter planets...
...Astronomer Edmund Halley of comet fame showed that Sirius, Procyon and Arcturus had changed positions−relative to other stars−since Greek times, establishing for the first time that the stars were not fixed in the heavens. By the early 1900s, astronomers had learned that the sun was merely one of billions of stars in a disc-shaped galaxy, or island of stars, then believed by many to constitute the entire universe. In 1920 Harlow Shapley calculated that the galaxy, called the Milky Way, was some 300,000 light years* in diameter, a distance too stupendous for most people...
...birthplace was probably not a supernova, or exploding star. Such stellar catastrophes are far too spectacular to escape general notice, and with the exception of Matthew, none of the Apostles or King Herod mentions such a brilliant star near the time that Jesus was born. Nor does a comet seem likely to have been the Christmas star. True. Halley's comet, which was first seen in 240 B.C., reappeared in 12 B.C. But that was several years before the earliest date on which Jesus could have been born. In any case, neither Halley's nor any lesser comets...