Word: solarized
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...were all the same object and boldly predicted that it would appear again in 76 years, the time it requires to make a single orbit around the sun. When Halley's comet reappeared on schedule in 1758, it offered convincing evidence that comets were really members of the solar system rather than messengers of God's wrath...
...that of Dutch Astronomer Jan Oort, who says that comets exist by the billions in a vast swarm of debris beyond Pluto that stretches halfway to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. The debris, called Oort's Cloud, coalesced from the swirling dust and gases in the original solar nebula, from which the sun, earth and other planets and moons were formed. Thus comets are primordial matter, largely unchanged since the solar system's birth. (Lyttleton ascribes a different origin to the comets: he thinks that they are swept up by solar gravity as the sun wheels around...
...comet enters the inner part of the solar system, the sun's heat begins to liberate dust and gases from the nucleus, forming a large cloud called the coma. Such clouds may become Jovian in proportions, with a diameter of more than 100,000 miles, though they are very thinly dispersed. In 1969 and 1970, NASA'S Orbiting Astronomical Observatory (OAO-2) discovered that the coma of comets is surrounded by a still larger ball of wispy hydrogen that may far exceed the sun's diameter of 860,000 miles...
...hydrogen cloud is believed to be formed from the dissociation of water molecules in the nucleus. As the comet nears the sun, it acquires its most characteristic feature. Bombarded steadily by the charged particles of the solar wind and by the slight but measurable pressure of sunlight itself, the cometary gases and dust are swept back to form one or more glowing tails. These may reach lengths of 60 million miles or more, roughly two-thirds the distance between earth and sun. Regardless of the direction of the comet's travels, its tail is always directed away from...
...during a search for the remnants of 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...