Astronomy

Cheseaux’s Comet of 1744

Okay, so maybe you’re not that crazy about comets, but I promise you’ll like No. 5 in our Comet of the Week: the famous Cheseaux’s Comet of 1744, or, as I like to call it, The Great Singing Comet.

Cheseaux's Comet

What distinguishes this comet, spotted in late 1743 by, among others, the Swiss astronomer Jean-Philippe de Cheseaux, was its remarkable six-rayed tail.

“The comet arrived at perihelion on March 1 by which time it was bright enough to be observed in daylight with the naked eye. After perihelion a spectacular multiple tail developed which rose well above the morning horizon, in a dark sky while the head was still well below that same horizon. The tail formed a giant fan comprised of six multiple tails. While astronomers were familiar with comets having two tails (a straight gas or ion tail and a curved dust trail), one with six was something completely different.” (From Hunting and Imaging Comets, by Martin Mobberley, 2011.)

But wait! It gets better: Cheseaux’s comet made noise. Yes. Chinese astronomers, who also observed it, reported hearing sounds issuing from the comet. I like to imagine it as a kind of singing:

“Mysteriously, some of the Chinese records of this comet describe atmospheric sounds when the object was at its peak. In an era when there were no planes or cars how can this be explained? Maybe the sounds were distant animals howling in terror at the sight of such an awesome spectacle?” (Mobberly.)

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology offers this possible explanation for sounds emanating from falling stars and comets:

“This was one of closest cometary approaches on record. If the comet’s charged particles or magnetic field interacted with the magnetosphere, VLF waves may have been generated to produce electrophonic sounds at ground level.”

There you have it.

After the nights of March 7-8, Cheseaux’s Comet was never seen, or heard from, again. But it achieved such great and flashing fame that for a time it appeared on German coins.

The Comet of the Black Death (Comet Negra, 1347)

Number three in our weekly series of Great Comets: The Comet of the Black Death, or Comet Negra. Hard to beat this one for dramatic impact.

Halley's Comet 1457 cropped

The Comet of the Black Death is said to have coincided with the great plague, the “Black Death,” that killed half the population of Europe from 1346 to 1350. It’s believed that the plague originated in Central Asia and was carried along the Silk Road into Europe by fleas on rats.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder depicted the Black Death this way, in his 1562 painting “The Triumph of Death”:

The Triumph of Death

There are other theories, too, about the origin of the Black Death. One says that a comet or fragments of a comet precipitated the Black Death. If the last Ice Age was caused by an asteroid impact, as some scientists believe, then it’s not much of a stretch to imagine that a piece of a comet striking the Earth could have disrupted the atmosphere enough to initiate the famines and plagues that characterized the Black Death:

“In France . . . was seen the terrible Comet called Negra. In December appeared over Avignon a Pillar of Fire. There were many great Earthquakes, Tempests, Thunders and Lightnings, and thousands of People were swallowed up; the Courses of Rivers were stopt; some Chasms of the Earth sent forth Blood. Terrible Showers of Hail, each stone weighing 1 Pound to 8; Abortions in all Countries; in Germany it rained Blood; in France Blood gushed out of the Graves of the Dead, and stained the Rivers crimson; Comets, Meteors, Fire-beams, corruscations in the Air, Mock-suns, the Heavens on Fire . . .”

You get the idea. (From A General Chronological History of the Air, Weather, Seasons, Meteors, Etc., by Thomas Short, 1749. London.)

That comet image, by the way, is really from a 1456 depiction of Halley’s Comet, as seen in the illustration below. I couldn’t find any images of the Comet of the Black Death. There was no one alive to paint one, apparently.

Halley's Comet 1456

Cat’s Eye Nebula

The Cat’s Eye Nebula, as photographed by the Hubble Telescope. Discovered in 1786, the Cat’s Eye Nebula lies 3,000 light years from Earth. Interestingly (for me anyway), the Cat’s Eye Nebula is only about 1000 years old (+/- 260 years).

Cat's Eye Nebula

A planetary nebula like this (which, confusingly, has nothing to do with planets) is a star near its last stage of life. A star begins as a cloud of molecular dust, settles into a main-sequence star like the Sun, expands to become a red giant, then contracts to a white dwarf, then dissipates as a planetary nebula, then explodes into a supernova. Somewhere in that sequence there are also red dwarfs and blue dwarfs.

You can see more amazing photos of deep space objects and such at NASA’s http://hubblesite.org/.

And here’s a trippy, catchy song about supernovas, by the band Oasis when they were still good:

The Great Easter Comet of 1066

This week’s featured comet: The Great Easter Comet of 1066.

Comete_Tapisserie_Bayeux

The Great Easter Comet of 1066–also called “The Comet of the Conquest”–was actually Halley’s Comet, making one of its 76-year periodic appearances. And 1066, you’ll remember from history class, was the year of the Norman Conquest of England.

Legend says that the comet appeared at Easter time and shone for forty days, waxing and waning with the moon:

“Under its seven rays, that year, William the Conqueror felt inspired to fall upon England, while Harold, the Saxon, on the other hand, saw in the Comet a star of dread foreboding and of doom.”

The comet lit the Normans’ trip across the English Channel, and William pointed it out to his soldiers to stir their courage, saying it was a sign from heaven of their coming victory.

Sigebert of Brabant, a Belgian chronicler of the time, wrote of the comet: “Over the island of Britain was seen a star of a wonderful bigness, to the train of which hung a fiery sword not unlike a dragon’s tail; and out of the dragon’s mouth issued two vast rays, whereof one reached as far as France, and the other, divided into seven lesser rays, stretched away towards Ireland.”

After the Norman Conquest, the comet was immortalized in the Bayeux Tapestry, sewn by William’s wife, Queen Matilda, and her court. You can still see the tapestry in Bayeux, France. In one panel, King Harold of England is shown cowering on his throne while his people huddle together in fear, pointing at the comet. The Latin legend over the picture reads “Isti Mirant Stella”: They marvel at the star.

576px-Bayeux_Tapestry_scene32_Halley_comet

One result of the Norman Conquest (and of the comet, you could say) is that we now have many, many words of French origin in the English language, such as “conquest,” “origin,” and “language.”

Comets and Aerolites

“Comets and Aerolites,” from Reynolds’s Series of Astronomical Diagrams, by James Reynolds, 1847. An aerolite is a meteorite, specifically, a stony meteorite consisting of silicate materials.

The falling stars you see in a meteor shower are from the “dust trail” left by comets as they circle through the solar system.

Comets and Aerolites

Image from Stephen Ellcock’s FB page “The Celestial Archives: Pre-Space Age Images of the Heavens.”