Hydie E.

Magalzo 7 Newton

February 17, 2014

Research #5: Halley saw the comet only once in 1682. What evidence will prove that it was a regular visitor of earth? INTRODUCTION:
Halley's Comet officially designated 1P/Halley, is the best-known of the shortperiod comets and is visible from Earth every 7576 years, Halley is the only shortperiod comet that is clearly visible to the naked eye from Earth, and the only naked-eye comet that might appear twice in a human lifetime. Other naked-eye comets may be brighter and more spectacular, but will appear only once in thousands of years. Halley last appeared in the inner Solar System in 1986 and will next appear in mid-2061. Halley has been a regular visitor to Earth's skies for thousands of years. In 1705, English astronomer Edmond Halley suggested a comet seen in 1682 was the same one that lit up the sky in 1531 and 1607. He further predicted it would be back in 1758. When this came to pass, the comet was given his name. Scientists have been forecasting the appearance of Halley ever since. They can also cast backward in time, making "retro dictions" to calculate when and where Halley's Comet would have appeared in the past. Many of these can be confirmed with historical records. Babylonian and Chinese documents, for example, confirm the calculations that Halley passed Earth in 87 B.C., 164 B.C. and 240 B.C., scientists say.

BODY:
The 240 B.C. observation made by Chinese astronomers had been the earliest confirmed sighting of Halley's comet. But ancient Greek documents describe a comet that could be Halley, visiting in 466 B.C. The Greek writings mainly describe another dramatic astronomical event of that year: a meteorite the size of a "wagon-load" that fell in northern Greece. Aristotle wrote about the meteorite 100 years later; Pliny, writing five centuries after the event, did as well. Some of these accounts, including Aristotle's, mention that a comet was lighting up the sky when the meteorite hit. This information is consistent with the mathematical models, which suggest Halley flew by Earth in 466 B.C. To determine if this comet was actually Halley, Graham and Hintz extended existing astronomical models to include not just information on Halley's orbit, but details about its visibility. "We took their orbital-element calculations and tried to extrapolate where Halley's Comet would've been visible from Earth," Hintz told SPACE.com. "We wanted to know, could the Greek observers have seen it?"Their answer: Yes. Not only did the model suggest Halley would have been visible to the Greeks during that pass, it correctly projected that the light show would have lasted about 75 days an unusually long window in line with observations from the ancient Greek writer Daimachus. "It turned out to be a really strange path," Hintz said. "Halley may indeed have been visible for 70 or 75 days." The researchers also calculated that Halley's tail would have been very large, creating many shooting stars as debris from the tail flew through Earth's atmosphere. This detail, too, is recorded by Daimachus.

CONCLUSION:
But there is no evidence that the wagon-load meteorite came from Halley, or that the comet caused the strike. So therefore still, the evidence that the ancient Greeks recorded Halley's pass is not conclusive, the researchers say. To be entirely sure, researchers would need more details, such as which constellations the comet appeared in, and when. That's the kind of thing the meticulous Babylonians and Chinese noted in their records for Halley's passes a few centuries later. But the Greeks weren't that detailoriented, so this information is unlikely to exist for the 466 B.C. comet.