Word: ikeya
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Hunched at the eyepiece of his telescope early in the morning of December 29 in the Japanese city of Hamamatsu, Kaoru Ikeya suddenly grew tense. He had spotted an unfamiliar blob of light in the constellation of Ophiuchus. Five minutes later, 240 miles away in Kochi, Tsutomu Seki located the same strange object. Both checked their star maps, then hurriedly mounted their bicycles and pedaled furiously to the nearest telegraph office. There they dispatched the word to the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory. Incredibly, the same two amateur astronomers who had independently but almost simultaneously discovered 1965's famous and brilliant...
...observatory, scientists at the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass., announced the existence of the new comet. It was the 14th discovered during 1967, one more than the previous yearly record of 13. In honor of the discoverers, the Smithsonian named it Ikeya-Seki 1967n (the 14th letter in the alphabet). The new Ikeya-Seki, the Smithsonian reported, had a brightness of only the ninth magnitude and would gradually fade away without becoming visible to the naked...
...About Craters. The celestial find brought new honors to Ikeya, 24, and Seki, 37, each of whom has now discovered five comets that are wholly or partially named after him. Ikeya became obsessed with astronomy in junior high school, where he had an opportunity to peer through a small telescope one night and saw the craters of the moon and the rings of Saturn. "I was so excited," he recalls, "that I couldn't sleep nights and would stay outdoors staring at the stars. My mother was convinced that I had gone mad and talked of taking...
After graduation from high school in 1959, Ikeya got a job at a piano factory, where he is now a key polisher and earns $72.22 per month-enough to leave $6 per month for astronomy expenses after he contributes to the support of his mother and five brothers and sisters. Constructing his own 6-and 8-in. telescopes, Ikeya began scanning the sky in 1962 and discovered his first comet the following year...
...infra-red recordings also seem to rule out the theory that comets are composed primarily of ice and dust. Ikeya-Seki's high temperatures could have occurred only if it contained large amounts of metallic material. Most of the comet's lighter-weight chemical elements were probably boiled away during a previous close approach to the sun. The scientists also measured the total amount of energy Ikeya-Seki radiated before and after it swung around the sun; they calculated that it lost 65% of its mass and broke into two pieces...