Comets Open House Summary

Thu, 06 Dec 2018 20:52:13 -0500

At tonight’s open house we discussed Comets. We looked at the properties of comets, describing each of the three components (the nucleus, coma, and tails). We then discussed and looked at a couple examples of comets such as Hale-Bopp (1997), McNaught (2007), and of course Halley’s comet (1986). Comets have been depicted through history as far back as Chinese records from 613 BCE and later in Babylonian tablets and tapestry from the Middle Ages. Edmond Halley’s contributions to the study of comets was astronomical, with him providing the first scientific evidence for comets orbiting the sun in a periodic way. Comets come from the Scattered Disk, the Kuiper Belt, and the Oort Cloud. Some missions to study comets have been the International Cometary Explorer (ICE), Giotto, Deep Impact (the first attempt to land on a comet), and Rosetta (the most recent mission). On December 17th, the comet Wirtanen will be visiting Earth! We would like to thank everyone that attended and be sure to join us on January 11th for another Open House on stars at 7:30 in PHYS 401!