Word: halley
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...violins followed concertmaster Lynn Chang's example, sawing into their strings with a vigorous attack which was missing in the first concerts of the season. Chang, who is one of the Music 180 graduates, was joined in the Concertino (solo group) of the fifth Brandenburg by a capable Halley Sheffler on the flute and David Schulenberg at the Harpsichord. Schulenberg's rendition of the show-stopping harpsichord cadenza was textured like the score of a Broadway musical, and it evoked a ripple of whispered enthusiasm from the audience...
...Freaks. Cometphobia took another form during Halley's reappearance in 1910. Fearing that mankind would be poisoned as the earth passed through noxious gases in the comet's tail, many people bought gas masks and "comet pills" to prevent asphyxiation; they also staged a round of end-of-the-world parties. But the gases were far too tenuous to do any damage, and the earth remained unscathed. One famous prediction, however, did come to pass. Mark Twain, who had been born during the comet's previous visitation in 1835, and wrote that he expected to die during...
Still, fear of comets persisted. Just before Halley's comet returned in 1835, rumors spread that it would collide with the earth. Although the path of Halley's comet precluded collision, the possibility that a comet could strike the earth is not entirely farfetched. The earth bears the scars of at least two impacts that some scientists ascribe to comets: at the site of the Great Tunguska catastrophe, which leveled the Siberian landscape for more than 20 miles around in 1908, and in the geological formation known as the Witwatersrand gold field in South Africa. The possibility...
...distant space. After making some rush observations of his own ("We spent a very tense weekend out at Harvard Observatory's Agassiz Station"), he reported that the comet Kohoutek had been sighted at a distance of roughly 480 million miles from earth, barely within the orbit of Jupiter. (Halley's comet, by contrast, was not found on its last approach until it was some 180 million miles closer to earth-even though astronomers knew where to look for it.) Never before had a comet been detected at such a great distance...
...early discovery meant that Kohoutek was not only intrinsically brighter than Halley's comet but probably quite large. Astronomer Elizabeth Roemer, of the University of Arizona, estimates that Kohoutek's nucleus is about 25 miles in diameter, far larger than most comets, probably including Halley's. Other astronomers calculate that Kohoutek weighs about 1 trillion tons. But size is not Kohoutek's only distinction. It will pass within 13 million miles of the sun. That close flyby, well within the orbit of Mercury, should make for a dazzling interaction between sun and comet. Perhaps most important...