Word: haling
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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...
...Hale checked his sky atlas, then logged on to the computer at the quaintly named Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams, located at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory. Maybe this would turn out to be a known object. It didn't. "Now I felt I had a pretty live suspect," he says. He fired off an E-mail message to Daniel Green and Brian Marsden, who run the Bureau for the International Astronomical Union, reporting a possible new comet. A few hours later he looked again, and the object had moved. It was a comet for sure...
...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...
...often, however, a new crust can form out of dust falling back onto the surface. This too can lead to false optimism. "With Comet Halley, which has been back many times," says University of Texas astronomer Anita Cochran, "only about 15% to 20% of the surface is active." Admits Hale: "It's been kind of nerve-racking to sit through all those months wondering if the comet would fizzle...