Word: cometted
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Until now, you had to be pretty much of an astronomy nut to see Comet Hale-Bopp. Not that the comet is especially hard to spot. For weeks it has been putting on a show to rival last year's Comet Hyakutake. People have seen Hale-Bopp, without a telescope or even binoculars, from such unpromising, light-polluted vantage points as midtown Manhattan and downtown Chicago. Amateur astronomers have been taking telescopic photos of the comet for well over a year; the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Hale-Bopp home page on the World Wide Web NewProducts.jpl.nasa.gov/comet has posted more...
...certain where the water came from, though a collision with an icy comet is likely. Just as important as the origin of the ice is its future. "Settlers could break the water into oxygen and hydrogen and turn them into rocket fuel and air," suggests Dunston. And as for the possibility of ice-dwelling organisms? Not likely. Water may help sustain life, but at nearly 400[degrees] below, it couldn't get started in the first place...
Duncan Steel, an Australian astronomer, has calculated that if the asteroid had struck Earth, it would have hit at some 58,000 m.p.h. The resulting explosion, scientists estimate, would have been in the 3,000-to-12,000-megaton range. That, says astronomer Eugene Shoemaker, a pioneer asteroid and comet hunter, "is like taking all of the U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons, putting them in one pile and blowing them...
...world, however, still seems largely unconcerned with the danger posed by large bodies hurtling in from space, despite the spectacle two years ago of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 riddling the planet Jupiter with mammoth explosions. It remains to be seen whether last week's record near-miss has changed any minds...
...astronomer from Harvard, then a tiny school in the wilderness of the New World, sent his observations of what would later be called Halley's comet to Isaac Newton. Newton used this data from Harvard in his Principia, beginning a long tradition of astronomical excellence at the New England school, including the attendance of Edwin Hubble, the most famous astronomer of the 20th century...