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Editor's Note: A version of this column has already been published on the author's website. website.
The Comet Wirtanen 46P should be the subject of a nice vacation surprise in December.
P. Clay Sherrod, researcher, teacher and author, whose observatories in Arkansas Sky are recognized as "the oldest scientific facility and private observatory in America," wrote: "This comet is slowly getting closer of the perihelion on December 16 (the nearest passage) by the sun), it will also pass near the Earth four days later in December and may be as bright as the 3rd magnitude, or even a little brighter. is easily visible to the naked eye and should definitely be a treat for the binoculars. "
Sherrod added that its proximity to the Earth means that it will move relatively quickly to the nearest approach on December 19th. It will not seem to move when viewed, even with the help of a telescope, he said, but hour by hour. an observer should be able to see that he has changed his position.
An exciting factor is that, from December 15 to 18, as Sherrod wrote, the comet will move between two famous star clusters, the Hyades and the Pleiades, and will likely be visible at the same time. naked eye at that moment. Clusters are also easily visible without binoculars or telescopes.
Spaceweather.com said that astronomers called Wirtanen "the comet of the year". The site explains in a publication of October 16: "In two months, December 16, the dirty ice ball of one kilometer wide will be within 11.5 million km of the Earth – this which makes it one of the 10 comets closest to the space age.Comet 46P / Wirtanen will likely become an object to the naked eye for several weeks during the holidays ".
Until the last centuries, comets have been observed and dreaded as supposed to be bad. In an article titled "Comets in Ancient Culture," Noah Goldman of the University of Maryland, College Park, writes that "in some cultures, the comet's tail gave it the appearance of a comet." a woman's head, with long hair hanging from behind her head.This painful symbol of mourning meant that the gods who had sent the comet to earth were unhappy.Others thought that the elongated comet looked like a sword of flaming fire in the night sky, a traditional sign of war and death. "
Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" reflects the fear of the ancient Romans of the bad behavior brought by these strange objects. Calpurnia, Caesar's wife, has a bad feeling about going to the Senate for the March ideas. Terrible omens have been seen and heard, including graves rendering their dead, spectral squadrons in the clouds fighting and blood dripping on the Capitol, "and ghosts screaming and screaming in the streets."
Squealing ghosts would suffice to keep me in the villa, not to mention blood drops. But Caesar answers, eh, what will happen, and anyway, the predictions suit the world in general, not especially to him.
Calpurnia has a rebuttal:
"When the beggars die, we see no comets, the sky itself announces the death of the princes."
These omens mean you, she says. He dismisses all the concerns and – well, we know what will happen next.
Joe Bauman
On the left, Rahu trying to devour the moon, which of course will escape him because he has no body, and to the right Ketu, the comet.
In Indian mythology, Ketu is Comet, the beloved seer who has a snake body. The Vedas recount that a demon who caused eclipses, Rahu, managed, by trickery, to absorb a few drops of celestial ambrosia conferring immortality. Rahu had a lower body shaped like a snake or fish. "However, the gods of the Sun and the Moon had witnessed Rahu's act," notes Patrick Das Gupta of the Department of Physics and Astrophysics at Dehli University in India. In the article "The comets in ancient India", he continues, "so the demon tried to devour them, after which Vishnu (a main deity) cut off his head by throwing his deadly discus, the Sudarshan chakra, in Rahu ".
As they were immortal, the demon parts became two living entities, Rahu with the head and Ketu with the bottom. "In the absence of a torso, the sun or the moon could not be held long after being swallowed by Chief Rahu … … so Hindu mythology dealt with the phenomenon of eclipses. "
An article archived in Hindu Dharma Forums reports: "The severed head was taken by Simihika, the mother of Asura Swarbhanu, and was patiently cared for.The head has for a time caught the body of the Serpent and it has been named Rahu He raised this body as his own son, and Lord Vishnu gave this body a snake's head, and it was Ketu's name that became, over time, a holy and venerated seer.
"Rahu and Ketu have not forgiven Sun and Moon for revealing them and they are causing Eclipse."
We now know that comets are a material from the formation of the solar system, the majority of which lies in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. The Belt "is a disk-shaped region beyond Neptune that extends from about 30 to 55 astronomical units (2.7 billion kilometers to more than 5 billion kilometers from the Earth). …
"There can be hundreds of thousands of icy bodies and a billion or so comets in this remote region of our solar system," NASA said. Short-period comets, those that take less than 200 years to circle the sun, often start there.
The Oort cloud lies well beyond Kupier's belt. It is a vast shell of icy materials beginning between 186 billion and 465 billion kilometers of the sun and extending over approximately 4.6 billion kilometers. "It's about a quarter of the distance between the nearest star, Proxima Centauri," adds theplanets.org. It indicates that the objects in the cloud are composed of ice with water, ammonia and methane, and that long-lived comets would probably originate there. Perhaps they are pushed towards the sun by interacting with other comets or by the gravity of a passing star.
A NASA science site describes comets as "cosmic snowballs made up of gas, rocks and frozen dust that revolve around the sun." When they are frozen, they are about the size of a small city. an orbit brings it closer to the sun, it warms the dust and gases in a giant glowing head bigger than most planets. " Tails of dust and gas move away from the sun and extend for millions of kilometers in space. Remnants of comets sometimes hang along the path, and each time the Earth passes through them, tiny dust causes meteor showers as the particles burn up in the atmosphere.
Needless to say, if a comet were to touch the Earth, it would be serious. But we have nothing to fear from Wirtanen and the heavenly beauty to anticipate.
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