Word: orbited
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...comet of 1456 and many of the others that influenced ancient history were one and the same: the celestial visitor that became known as Halley's comet. A 17th century protégé of Isaac Newton, Edmund Halley was convinced that comets travel, like planets, in closed orbits around the sun. Using his mentor's formulas, he calculated the paths of comets dating back to 1337 and found that three-those of 1456, 1531 and 1607 -had roughly the same orbit as the comet of 1682 (which he had seen as a young man). Halley concluded that...
...many mystics but as science fiction by most scientists-Velikov-sky blamed a near miss by a comet for such biblical events as the parting of the Red Sea and the plagues of Egypt. The fate of that comet? According to Velikovsky's scenario, it settled into an orbit near the earth and is now known as the planet Venus...
Wispy Hydrogen. Tugged by the gravity of a passing star, chunks of the Oort debris are occasionally pulled into orbits closer to the sun. Then perturbed further by the gravity of a massive planet, probably Saturn or Jupiter, they often enter a highly elliptical orbit that swings them close to the sun and then so far out again that they do not return to the vicinity of the sun for years. Some, like Encke's comet, which makes a pass around the sun every 3.3 years, have relatively small orbits. Others loop out billions of miles from...
...Biela's comet that Luboš Kohoutek made his great discovery. Interested in the minor bodies of the solar system since boyhood meteor-and comet-hunting expeditions in the Czechoslovak mountains, he had in the fall of 1971 located a cluster of about 50 small asteroids in an orbit roughly comparable to that of Biela's comet. Last February, using Hamburg Observatory's 32-in. Schmidt telescope, he tried to "recapture" the asteroids, which he feels may be the remaining chunks of the lost comet. To Kohoutek's surprise, he not only obtained pictures...
...ordinary visitor from 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...