Word: cometted
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Gate cult mixed phenobarbital, applesauce and vodka, slipped plastic bags over their heads and persuaded themselves that they were headed for a better life among the stars. Their suicide--the most lethal of the year's mass emotional activities--came in response to the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet, an astronomical surprise that incited other public anxieties about the coming millennium...
...French writer Roland Barthes used to argue that every truly moving photograph has a single absorbing spot, a place that calls forth feeling. He called it the punctum, Latin for puncture or point. It could be something as simple as the little smudge that is the comet Hale-Bopp, which was for a while the world's most celebrated dot. Since it was an ancient dot, and one that got around a lot, it shed an astral glamour wherever it appeared. Like the President or Sharon Stone, it made everything, even whole mountain ranges, look more consequential beside...
...lunar eclipses are found in the inscriptions on bones or tortoise shells of the Shang Dynasty over 3,000 years ago. In the 2,100 years from the Qin Dynasty to the late Qing Dynasty (that is, from 221 B.C. to 1911), the 27 appearances of Halley's Comet were all recorded in China. Zhang Heng, of the Han Dynasty, invented a seismograph to determine the location of earthquakes, and the celestial globe that showed the movement of the sun, moon and other stars. Mathematicians in the pre-Qin days put forward the proposition known as the Pythagorean theorem...
DIED. EUGENE SHOEMAKER, 69, vigilant planetary geologist who spent a lifetime tracking the comets he believed posed a threat to life on Earth; in a car accident; near Alice Springs, Australia. Shoemaker co-discovered the comet that smashed into Jupiter in July 1994, creating dazzling fireworks for stargazers...
Other hoped-for missions include a 13-year, 4 billion-mile-plus journey to Pluto and its companion moon Charon, tentatively set to launch in 2001; a comet-rendezvous mission that will take off in February 1999, fly by Comet Wild 2 in 2004 and fly back home with a bit of material from its diaphanous tail; and perhaps even a much-dreamed-of journey to Neptune's planet-size moon Triton. Says Goldin: "We're going to have the most aggressive exploration of our own solar system in the history of the human species...