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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...
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...
Astronomers also believe a comet impact is probably what did in the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That object was perhaps 10 miles across. At double the size, Hale-Bopp packs a lot more potential energy. Luckily for civilization, Hale-Bopp will miss Earth by 120 million miles...
...widely regarded as an omen of upheaval and disaster. Several Christian Fundamentalists, he writes in the current issue of Skeptical Inquirer, have proclaimed Hale-Bopp to be one of the "signs of the end times" foretold in the New Testament. They also suggest that the comet might be the object described in Revelation 8: 10 as a great star named Wormwood that "fell from heaven, blazing like a torch." Wormwood, according to the Bible, destroys a third of almost everything: people, land, rivers and seas. Others claim that the comet is some kind of alien mother ship "under intelligent control...
Speculation reached a fever pitch last November when Chuck Shramek, an amateur astronomer based in Houston, Texas, announced on a nationwide radio talk show that he had photographed a "Saturn-like object" that seemed to be following in Hale-Bopp's wake. Shramek's breathless claim elevated Hale-Bopp fantasies from supermarket tabloids to the mainstream press and generated thousands of posts to message boards and astronomy home pages on the Internet. One fast-spreading rumor had it that the object was an alien spacecraft four times the size of Earth...