comet

—cometary /kom"i ter'ee/, cometic /keuh met"ik/, cometical, adj. —cometlike, adj.

/kom"it/, n. Astron.

a celestial body moving about the sun, usually in a highly eccentric orbit, consisting of a central mass surrounded by an envelope of dust and gas that may form a tail that streams away from the sun.

[1150-1200; ME comete < AF, OF < L cometes, cometa < Gk kométes wearing long hair, equiv. to kome-, var. s. of komân to let one's hair grow (deriv. of kóme hair) + -tes agent suffix]

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I

Any of a class of small icy objects orbiting the Sun and developing diffuse gaseous envelopes and often long glowing tails when near the Sun.

They are distinguished from other objects in the solar system by their composition, hazy appearance, and elongated orbits. Most comets originate in the Oort cloud or in the Kuiper belt. Other bodies' gravity can alter their orbits, causing them to pass close to the Sun. Short-period comets return in 200 years or less, others in thousands of years or not at all. A comet typically consists of a small, irregular nucleus, often described as a "dirty snowball," with dust and other materials frozen in water mixed with volatile compounds. When one nears the Sun, the heat vaporizes its surface, releasing gases and dust particles, which form a cloud (coma) around the nucleus. Material in the coma may be pushed away from the Sun by its radiation and the solar wind, forming one or more tails. Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through dust left by the passage of a comet.

II

(as used in expressions)

Encke's Comet

Hale Bopp Comet

Halley's Comet

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▪ astronomy

Introduction

      any of a class of small celestial objects orbiting the Sun and developing diffuse gaseous envelopes and often long luminous tails when near the Sun. The comet makes a transient appearance in the sky and is often said to have a “hairy” tail. The word comes from the Greek komētēs, meaning “hairy one,” a description that fits the bright comets noticed by the ancients.

General considerations

Basic features

 Despite their name, many comets do not develop tails. Moreover, comets are not surrounded by nebulosity during most of their lifetime. The only permanent feature of a comet is its nucleus, which is a small body that may be seen as a stellar image in large telescopes when tail and nebulosity do not exist, particularly when the comet is still far away from the Sun. Two characteristics differentiate the cometary nucleus from a very small asteroid—namely, its orbit and its chemical nature. A comet's orbit is more eccentric; therefore, its distance to the Sun varies considerably. Its material is more volatile. When far from the Sun, however, a comet remains in its pristine state for eons without losing any volatile components because of the deep cold of space. For this reason, astronomers believe that pristine cometary nuclei may represent the oldest and best-preserved material in the solar system.

      During a close passage near the Sun, the nucleus of a comet loses water vapour and other more volatile compounds, as well as dust dragged away by the sublimating gases. It is then surrounded by a transient dusty “atmosphere” that is steadily lost to space. This feature is the coma, which gives a comet its nebulous appearance. The nucleus surrounded by the coma makes up the head of the comet. When it is even closer to the Sun, solar radiation usually blows the dust of the coma away from the head and produces a dust tail, which is often rather wide, featureless, and yellowish. The solar wind, on the other hand, drags ionized gas away in a slightly different direction and produces a plasma tail, which is usually narrow with nods and twists and has a bluish appearance.

Designations

      In order to classify the chronological appearance of comets, the Astronomische Nachrichten (“Astronomical Reports”) introduced in 1870 a system of preliminary and final designations that is still used today with only minor modifications. The preliminary designation classifies comets according to their order of discovery, using the year of discovery followed by a lowercase letter in alphabetical order, as in 1987a, 1987b, 1987c, and so forth. Comets are reclassified as soon as possible—usually a few years later—according to their chronological order of passage at perihelion (closest distance to the Sun); a Roman numeral is used in this case, as in 1987 I, 1987 II, 1987 III, and so on. Since the discovery may have taken place at any time either before or after perihelion passage, the two chronologies are not necessarily in the same order, and even the year may change in the final designation. The official designation generally includes the name(s) of its discoverer(s)—with a maximum of three names—preceded by a P/ if the comet is on a periodic orbit. If a person discovers several comets, an Arabic numeral is used after his name, as in 1867 II Tempel 1 and 1873 II Tempel 2. The discoverer's rule has not always been strictly applied: comets P/Halley, P/Lexell, P/Encke, and P/Crommelin have been named after the astronomers who proved their periodic character. Some comets become bright so fast that they are discovered by a large number of persons at almost the same time. They are given an arbitrary impersonal designation such as Brilliant Comet (1882 II), Southern Comet (1947 XII), or Eclipse Comet (1948 XI). Finally, comets may be discovered by an unusual instrument without direct intervention of a specific observer, as in the case of the Earth-orbiting Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS). Its initials are used as if it were a human observer, as in 1983 VII IRAS-Araki-Alcock.

Historical survey of comet observations and studies

Early observations

      In ancient times, without interference from streetlights or urban pollution, comets could be seen by everyone. Their sudden appearance—their erratic behaviour against the harmonious order of the heavenly motions—was interpreted as an omen of nature that awed people and was used by astrologers to predict flood, famine, pestilence, or the death of kings. The Greek philosopher Aristotle (4th century BC) thought that the heavens were perfect and incorruptible. The very transient nature of comets seemed to imply that they were not part of the heavens but were merely earthly exhalations ignited and transported by heat to the upper atmosphere. Although the Roman philosopher Seneca (Seneca, Lucius Annaeus) (1st century AD) had proposed that comets could be heavenly bodies like the planets, Aristotle's ideas prevailed until the 14th century AD. Finally, during the 16th century the Danish nobleman Tycho Brahe (Brahe, Tycho) established critical proof that comets are heavenly bodies. He compared the lack of diurnal parallax of the comet of 1577 with the well-known parallax of the Moon (the diurnal parallax is the apparent change of position in the sky relative to the distant stars due to the rotation of the Earth). Tycho deduced that the comet was at least four times farther away than the Moon, establishing for the first time that comets were heavenly bodies.

The impact of Newton's work

      The German astronomer Johannes Kepler (Kepler, Johannes) still believed in 1619 that comets travel across the sky in a straight line. It was the English physicist and mathematician Isaac Newton (Newton, Sir Isaac) who demonstrated in his Principia (1687) that, if heavenly bodies are attracted by a central body (the Sun) in proportion to the inverse square of its distance, they must move along a conic section (circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola). Using the observed positions of the Great Comet of 1680, he identified its orbit as being nearly parabolic.

      Newton's friend, the astronomer Edmond Halley (Halley, Edmond), endeavoured to compute the orbits of 24 comets for which he had found accurate enough historical documents. Applying Newton's method, he presupposed a parabola as an approximation for each orbit. Among the 24 parabolas, 3 were identical in size and superimposed in space. The three relevant cometary passages (1531, 1607, and 1682) were separated by two time intervals of 76 and 75 years. Halley concluded that the parabolas were actually the end of an extremely elongated ellipse. Instead of three curves open to infinity, the orbit is closed and brings the same comet periodically back to the Earth. As a consequence, it would return in 1758, he predicted. Observed on Christmas night, 1758, by Johann Georg Palitzsch, a German amateur astronomer, the comet passed at perihelion in March 1759 and at perigee (closest to the Earth) in April 1759. The perihelion date of 1759 had been predicted with an accuracy of one month by Alexis-Claude Clairaut, a French astronomer and physicist. Clairaut's work contributed much to the acceptance of Newton's theory on the Continent. With this, the until-then anonymous comet came to be called Halley's comet (or, in modern nomenclature, Comet P/Halley (Halley's Comet)).

Passages of Comet P/Halley

      Since 1759, Comet Halley has reappeared three more times—in 1835, 1910, and 1986. Its trajectory has been computed backward, and all of its 30 previous passages described in historical documents over 22 centuries have been authenticated. Comet Halley's period has irregularly varied between 74.4 years (from 1835 to 1910) and 79.6 years (from AD 451 to 530). These variations, which have been accurately predicted, result from the changing positions of the giant planets, mainly Jupiter and Saturn, whose variable attractions perturb the trajectory of the comet. The space orientation of the orbit has been practically constant, at least for several centuries. Since its returns are not separated by an integer number of years, however, the comet encounters the Earth each time on a different point of its orbit around the Sun; thus, the geometry of each passage is different and its shortest distance to the planet varies considerably. The closest known passage to the Earth, 0.033 AU, occurred on April 9, AD 837.

 The perigee distance of most of Comet Halley's historical passages has been between 0.20 and 0.50 AU. The last perigee, on April 11, 1986, took place at 0.42 AU from the Earth (Figure 1—>). By contrast, the comet passed at only 0.14 AU from the Earth in 1910. Seen from closer range, it was brighter and had a longer tail than on its return in 1986. This is one reason why the 1986 passage proved so disappointing to most lay observers. Yet, a far more important factor had to do with geometry: in the latitudes of the major Western countries, the comet was hidden by the southern horizon during the few weeks in April 1986 when it was at its brightest. Moreover, the night sky of most Western countries is brightly and constantly illuminated by public and private lights. Even in the absence of moonlight, the nighttime sky is pervaded by a milky glare that easily hides the tail of a comet.

 Each century, a score of comets brighter than Comet Halley have been discovered. Yet, they appear without warning and will not be seen again. Many are periodic comets like Comet Halley, but their periods are extremely long (millennia or even scores or hundreds of millennia), and they have not left any identifiable trace in prehistory. Bright Comet Bennett 1970 II (Figure 2—>) will return in 17 centuries, whereas the spectacular Comet West 1976 VI will reappear in about 500,000 years. Among the comets that can easily be seen with the unaided eye, Comet Halley is the only one that returns in a single lifetime. Approximately 100 comets whose periods are between 3 and 200 years are known, however. Unfortunately they are or have become too faint to be readily seen without the aid of telescopes (see below Periodic comets (comet)).

Modern cometary research

      During the 19th century it was shown that the radiant (i.e., spatial direction) of the spectacular meteor showers (meteor shower) of 1866, 1872, and 1885 coincided well with three known cometary orbits that happened by chance to cross the Earth's orbit at the dates of the observed showers. The apparent relationship between comets and meteor showers was interpreted by assuming that the cometary nucleus was an aggregate of dust or sand grains without any cohesion. (This conception of the cometary nucleus became known as the “sandbank” model [see below Cometary models (comet)].) Meteor showers were explained by the spontaneous scattering of the dust (interplanetary dust particle) grains along a comet's orbit, and the cometary nucleus began to be regarded only as the densest part of a meteor stream. At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, spectroscopy revealed that the reflection of sunlight by the dust was not the only source of light in the tail; it showed the discontinuous emission that constitutes the signature of gaseous compounds. More specifically, it revealed the existence in the coma of several radicals—molecular fragments such as cyanogen (CN) and the carbon forms C₂ and C₃, which are chemically unstable in the laboratory because they are very reactive in molecular collisions. Spectroscopy also enabled investigators to detect the existence of a plasma component in the cometary tail by the presence of molecular ions (ion), as, for example, those of carbon monoxide (CO⁺), nitrogen (N₂⁺), and carbon dioxide (CO₂⁺). The radicals and ions are built up by the three light elements carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and oxygen (O). hydrogen (H) was added when the radical CH was discovered belatedly on spectrograms of Comet Halley taken in 1910. The identification of CH was proposed by the American astronomer Nicholas Bobrovnikoff in 1931 and confirmed in 1938 by Marcel Nicolet of Belgium. In 1941 another Belgian astronomer, Pol Swings (Swings, Pol), and his coworkers identified three new ions: CH⁺, OH⁺, and CO₂⁺. The emissions of the light elements hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and sulfur and of carbon monoxide were finally detected when the far ultraviolet spectrum (which is absorbed by the Earth's atmosphere) was explored during the 1970s with the help of rockets and satellites. This included the very large halo (10⁷ kilometres) of atomic hydrogen (the Lyman-alpha emission line) first observed in Comets Tago-Sato-Kosaka 1969 IX and Bennett 1970 II.

      Although the sandbank model was still seriously considered until the 1960s and '70s by a small minority (most notably the British astronomer Raymond A. Lyttleton), the presence of large amounts of gaseous fragments of volatile molecules in the coma suggested to Bobrovnikoff the release by the nucleus of a bulk of unobserved “parent” molecules such as H₂O, CO₂, and NH₃ (ammonia). In 1948, Swings proposed that these molecules should be present in the nucleus in the solid state as ices.

      In a fundamental paper, the American astronomer Fred L. Whipple set forth in 1950 the so-called dirty snowball model, according to which the nucleus is a lumpy piece of icy conglomerate wherein dust is cemented by a large amount of ices (ice)—not only water ice but also ices of more volatile molecules. This amount must be substantial enough to sustain the vaporizations for a large number of revolutions. Whipple noted that the nuclei of some comets at least are solid enough to graze the Sun without experiencing total destruction, since they apparently survive unharmed. (Some but not all Sun-grazing nuclei split under solar tidal forces.) Finally, argued Whipple, the asymmetric vaporization of the nuclear ices sunward produces a jet action opposite to the Sun on the solid cometary nucleus. When the nucleus is rotating, the jet action is not exactly radial. This explained the theretofore mysterious nongravitational force identified as acting on cometary orbits. In particular, the orbital period of P/Encke (Encke's Comet) mysteriously decreased by one to three hours per revolution (of 3.3 years), whereas that of P/Halley increased by some three days per revolution (of 76 years). For Whipple, a prograde rotation of the nucleus of P/Encke and a retrograde rotation of that of P/Halley could explain these observations. In each case, a similar amount of some 0.5 to 0.25 percent of the ices had to be lost per revolution to explain the amount of the nongravitational force. Thus, all comets decay in a matter of a few hundred revolutions. This duration is only at most a few centuries for Encke and a few millennia for Halley. At any rate, it is millions of times shorter than the age of the solar system.

      The observed comets, however, have obviously survived until now. If they have existed for billions of years, they must have been stored in an extremely cold place far away from the Sun before recently coming into the inner solar system where they could be seen from the Earth. A reply to such a suggestion had already been anticipated in 1932 by the Estonian-born astronomer Ernest J. Öpik (Öpik, Ernest Julius), who proposed the possible existence of a large cloud of unobservable comets surrounding the solar system. Nearly 20 years later, the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrick Oort (Oort, Jan Hendrik) established the existence of such a cloud of comets by indirect reasoning based on observations. Since the appearance of his theory in 1950, this enormous cloud of comets has come to be called the Oort cloud.

      Oort showed by statistical arguments that a steady flux of a few “new” comets are observed per year (those that had never been through the solar system before). This flux comes from the fringe of the Oort cloud. He identified it by looking at the distribution of the original values of the total energies of cometary orbits (see below for discussion of total energy in Types of orbits (comet)). These energies are in proportion to a⁻¹, with a being the semimajor axis of the cometary orbit. The original value of a refers to the orbit when the comet was still outside of the solar system, as opposed to the osculating orbit, which refers to the arc observed from the Earth after it has been modified by the perturbations (perturbation) of the giant planets. Passages through the solar system produce a rather wide diffusion in orbital energies (in a ⁻¹). In 1950 Oort accounted for only 19 accurate original orbits of long-period comets. The fact that 10 of the 19 orbits were concentrated in a very narrow range of a ⁻¹ established that most of them had never been through this diffusion process due to the planets. The mean value of a for these new comets suggested the distance they were coming from—about 10⁵ AU. This distance is also the place where perturbations resulting from the passage of nearby stars begin to be felt. The distance coincidence suggested to Oort that stellar perturbations were the mechanism by which comets were sent into the planetary system.

      Subsequent work by the American astronomer Brian G. Marsden and his coworkers confirmed the existence of the Oort cloud. Their list of approximately 90 original orbits crammed within an extremely narrow range of a ⁻¹ corroborated Oort's initial effort. The mean aphelion distance of this list of new comets implies, however, that the Oort cloud margin is only at some 40,000 to 50,000 AU, which makes the standard mechanism of stellar perturbations much less effective than Oort had believed. Comets must therefore come down from the Oort cloud in several steps, penetrating first into the outer solar system where the perturbations of Uranus and Neptune are weak enough not to remove them from the action of passing stars except after several revolutions.

      During the late 1980s astronomers explored new ideas with which to determine how the outer perturbations on the Oort cloud could increase. Dark molecular clouds, for example, may be substituted for stars as major perturbing agents. The hypothesis that there exists some extra undetected matter (like black dwarfs) in the disk of the Milky Way Galaxy also has been used. Then, the total mass distribution in the galactic disk may be large enough to induce tidal forces in the Oort cloud that would change cometary orbits (orbit).

Motion and discovery of comets

Types of orbits

      In the absence of planetary perturbations and nongravitational forces, a comet will orbit the Sun on a trajectory that is a conic section with the Sun at one focus. The total energy E of the comet, which is a constant of motion, will determine whether the orbit is an ellipse, a parabola, or a hyperbola. The total energy E is the sum of the kinetic energy of the comet and of its gravitational potential energy in the gravitational field of the Sun. Per unit mass, it is given by E = ¹/₂v² − GMr⁻¹, where v is the comet's velocity and r its distance to the Sun, with M denoting the mass of the Sun and G the gravitational constant. If E is negative, the comet is bound to the Sun and moves in an ellipse. If E is positive, the comet is unbound and moves in a hyperbola. If E = 0, the comet is unbound and moves in a parabola.

      In polar coordinates written in the plane of the orbit, the general equation for a conic section is

      where r is the distance from the comet to the Sun, q the perihelion distance, e the eccentricity of the orbit, and θ an angle measured from perihelion. When 0 ≤ e < 1, E < 0 and the orbit is an ellipse (the case e = 0 is a circle, which constitutes a particular ellipse); when e = 1, E = 0 and the orbit is a parabola; and when e > 1, E > 0 and the orbit is a hyperbola.

      In space a comet's orbit is completely specified by six quantities called its orbital elements. Among these are three angles that define the spatial orientation of the orbit: i, the inclination of the orbital plane to the plane of the ecliptic; Ω, the longitude of the ascending node measured eastward from the vernal equinox; and ω, the angular distance of perihelion from the ascending node (also called the argument of perihelion). The three most frequently used orbital elements within the plane of the orbit are q, the perihelion distance in astronomical units; e, the eccentricity; and T, the epoch of perihelion passage.

Identifying comets and determining their orbits

      Up to the beginning of the 19th century, comets were discovered exclusively by visual means. Many discoveries are still made visually with moderate-size telescopes by amateur astronomers. Although comets can be present in any region of the sky, they are often discovered near the western horizon after sunset or near the eastern horizon before sunrise, since they are brightest when closest to the Sun. Because of the Earth's rotation and direction of motion in its orbit, discoveries before sunrise are more likely, as confirmed by discovery statistics. At discovery a comet may still be faint enough not to have developed a tail; therefore, it may look like any nebulous object—e.g., an emission nebula, a globular star cluster, or a galaxy. The famous 18th-century French comet hunter Charles Messier (Messier, Charles) (nicknamed “the ferret of comets” by Louis XV for his discovery of 21 comets) compiled his well-known catalog (Messier catalog) of “nebulous objects” so that such objects would not be mistaken for comets. The final criterion remains the apparent displacement of the comet after a few hours or a few days with respect to the distant stars; by contrast, the nebulous objects of Messier's catalog do not move. After such a displacement has been indisputably observed, any amateur wishing to have the comet named for himself must report his claim to the nearest observatory as soon as possible.

      Most comets are and remain extremely faint. Today, a larger and larger proportion of comet discoveries are thus made fortuitously from high-resolution photographs (photography, history of), as, for instance, those taken during sky surveys by professional astronomers engaged in other projects.

      The faintest recorded comets are approaching the limit of detection of large telescopes (those that are two metres or more in diameter). That is to say, they are of the 22nd–23rd magnitude, or 10⁶ to 10⁷ times fainter than the limit of the naked eye. Several successive photographic observations of these faint moving objects are necessary to ensure identification and simultaneous calculation of a preliminary orbit. In order to determine a preliminary orbit as quickly as possible, the eccentricity e = 1 is assumed since some 90 percent of the observed eccentricities are close to one, and a parabolic motion is computed. This is generally sufficient to ensure against “losing” the comet in the sky.

      The best conic section representing the path of the comet at a given instant is known as the osculating orbit. It is tangent to the true path of the chosen instant, and the velocity at that point is the same as the true instantaneous velocity of the comet. Nowadays, high-speed computers make it possible to produce a final ephemeris (table of positions) that is not only based on the definitive orbit but also includes the gravitational forces of the Sun and of all significant planets that constantly change the osculating orbit. In spite of this fact, the deviation between the observed and the predicted positions usually grows (imperceptibly) with the square of time. This is the signature of a “neglected” acceleration, which comes from a nongravitational force. Formulas representing the smooth variation of the nongravitational force with heliocentric distance are now included for many orbits. The most successful formula assumes that water ice prevails and controls the vaporization of the nucleus.

Cometary statistics

      The Catalog of Cometary Orbits, compiled by Marsden, remains the standard reference for orbital statistics. Its 1989 edition lists 1,292 computed orbits from 239 BC to AD 1989; only 91 of them were computed using the rare accurate historical data from before the 17th century. More than 1,200 are therefore derived from cometary passages during the last three centuries. The 1,292 cometary apparitions of Marsden's catalog involve only 810 individual comets; the remainder represents the repeated returns of periodic comets.

Periodic comets

      The periodic comets are usually divided into short-period comets (those with periods of less than 200 years) and long-period comets (those with periods of more than 200 years). Of the 155 short-period comets, 93 have been observed at two or more perihelion passages. In 1989, four of these comets had been definitely lost, and three more were probably lost, presumably because of their decay in the solar heat. Some authors have found it advantageous to change the definition of short-period comets by diminishing their longest-period cutoff to 20 years. This leaves 135 short-period comets (new style) in the Catalog; the 20 others having periods between 20 and 200 years are called intermediate-period comets. These two new classes are separated by a small period gap. The average short-period comet has a seven-year period, a perihelion distance of 1.5 AU, and a small inclination (13°) on the ecliptic. All short-period comets (new style) revolve in the direct (prograde) sense around the Sun, just as the planets do. The intermediate-period comets have on average a larger inclination of the ecliptic, and five of them turn around the Sun in a retrograde direction. The most famous of the latter is P/Halley (30 appearances); the others are P/Tempel-Tuttle (4 appearances), P/Pons-Gambart, P/Hartley-IRAS, and P/Swift-Tuttle (the last three with only 1 appearance each). Eleven of the 20 intermediate-period comets have been observed during a single appearance.

      The comets with long-period orbits are distributed at random in all directions of the sky, and roughly half of them turn in the retrograde direction. Of the 655 comets of long period contained in the Catalog, 192 have osculating elliptic orbits, and 122 have osculating orbits that are very slightly hyperbolic. Finally, 341 are listed as having parabolic orbits, but this is rather fallacious because either it has not been possible to detect unequivocal deviations from a parabola on the (sometimes very short) arc along which the comets have been observed or, more simply, the final calculations have never been made. The parabola is always assumed first in the preliminary computation as it is easier to deal with. If the osculating orbit is computed backward to when the comet was still far beyond the orbit of Neptune and if the orbit is then referred to the centre of mass of the solar system, the original orbits almost always prove to be elliptic. (The centre of mass of the solar system is different from the centre of the Sun primarily because of the position of massive Jupiter.) Twenty-two original orbits remain (nominally) slightly hyperbolic beyond the orbit of Neptune, but 19 remain not significantly different from a parabola. Even the three that are significantly different near 50 AU are likely to become elliptic when they are 50,000 or 100,000 AU from the Sun. The reason is that, though the mass of the Oort cloud remains uncertain, it should be added to the mass of the inner solar system to compute the orbits. The smallest possible mass of the Oort cloud is likely to transform the orbits into ellipses. It is thus reasonable to believe that all observed comets were initially in elliptic orbits bound to the solar system. Accordingly, all parabolic and nearly parabolic comets are thought to be comets of very long period.

      The future orbit of a long-period comet is obtained when the osculating orbit is computed forward to when the comet will be leaving the planetary system (beyond the orbit of Neptune) and is referred to the centre of mass of the solar system. Because of the planetary perturbations, slightly more than half of the future orbits become strongly elliptic, whereas slightly less than half become strongly hyperbolic. Roughly half of the long-period comets are thus “captured” by the solar system on more strongly bound orbits; the other half are permanently ejected out of the system.

      Among the very-long-period comets, there is a particular class that Oort showed as having never passed through the planetary system before (see above), notwithstanding the fact that their original orbits were elliptic, which implies repeated passages. This paradox vanishes when it is understood that their perihelia were outside of the planetary system before their first appearance but that their orbits have been perturbed near aphelia (either by stellar or dark interstellar-cloud passages or by galactic tides) in such a way that their perihelia were lowered into the planetary system. The first passage of a “new” comet is usually brighter than an average passage (a large fraction of the famous bright historical comets were such new comets). This is possibly explained by the presence of more volatile gases and of a larger component of very fine dust. The most volatile gases may have disappeared during subsequent passages, and the finest dust may have agglomerated into larger dust grains that reflect less light for the same production rate. About 90 comets have been identified as new in long-period orbits. If the same proportion exists in the poorly computed parabolic orbits, the total must be close to 170 new comets in Marsden's catalog, but 80 of them have not been identified.

Groups of comets and other unusual cometary objects

      Some comets travel in strikingly similar orbits, only the time of perihelion passages being appreciably different. Members of such a group of comets are thought to be fragments from a larger comet that was tidally disrupted earlier by the Sun or in some cases by the differential jet action of nongravitational forces on a fragile nucleus. Many such breakups have been observed historically. Slight differences in the resultant velocities—though they occur very gently—are sufficient to cause cometary fragments to separate along orbits close to but distinct from each other, particularly as far as their total energy is concerned. A very slight variation in a⁻¹ introduces an orbital period that may vary by several years, and when the cometary fragments return they will go through perihelion at widely separated epochs. The best-known example is the famous group of “Sun-grazing” comets (also called the Kreutz group), which has 12 definite members (plus one probable) with perihelion distances between 0.002 and 0.009 AU (less than half a solar radius). Their periods are scattered from 400 to 2,000 years, and their last passages occurred between 1880 and 1970. The most famous fragment of the group is Comet Ikeya-Seki (Ikeya-Seki, Comet) 1965 VIII.

      Comet P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 (Schwassmann-Wachmann 1, Comet), which has a period of 15 years, is in a quasi-circular and somewhat unstable orbit between Jupiter and Saturn, with a perihelion q that equals 5.45 AU and an aphelion of 6.73 AU. It can be observed every year for several months when opposite to the Sun in the sky. Without any visible tail, it has irregular outbursts that make its coma grow in size for a few weeks and become up to 1,000 times as bright as normal.

      Another unusual object is the so-called asteroid 2060 Chiron, which has a similar orbit between Saturn and Uranus. Though first classified as an asteroid, its icy nucleus of some 300 kilometres suggests that it is a giant comet provisionally parked on a quasi-circular but unstable orbit. Indeed, Chiron develops weak, sporadic outbursts, and in 1989 a transient nebulosity surrounding it (a “coma”) was reported for the first time. Within a few thousand years, Chiron might be perturbed enough by Saturn to come closer to the Sun and become a spectacular comet.

      For faraway objects that contain volatile ices, the distinction between asteroids (asteroid) and comets becomes a matter of semantics because many orbits are unstable; an asteroid that comes closer to the Sun than usual may become a comet by producing a transient atmosphere that gives it a fuzzy appearance and that may develop into a tail. Some objects have been reclassified as a result of such occurrences. For example, asteroid 1990 UL3, which crosses the orbit of Jupiter, was reclassified as Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 2 late in 1990. Conversely, it is suspected that some of the Earth-approaching asteroids (Amors, Apollos, and Atens) could be the extinct nuclei of comets that have now lost most of their volatile ices.

      Two bright comets, Morehouse 1908 (Morehouse, Comet) III and Humason 1962 VIII, exhibited a peculiar tail spectrum in which the ion CO⁺ prevailed in a spectacular way, possibly because of an anomalous abundance of a parent molecule (carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, or possibly formaldehyde [CH₂O]) vaporizing from the nucleus. Finally, Comet Halley is the brightest and therefore the most famous of all short- and intermediate-period comets as the only one that returns in a single lifetime and can be seen with the naked eye.

The nature of comets

The nucleus

      As previously noted, the traditional picture of a comet with a hazy head and a spectacular tail applies only to a transient phenomenon produced by the decay in the solar heat of a tiny object known as the cometary nucleus. In the largest telescopes, the nucleus is never more than a bright point of light at the centre of the cometary head. At substantial distances from the Sun, the comet seems to be reduced to its starlike nucleus. The nucleus is the essential part of a comet because it is the only permanent feature that survives during the entire lifetime of the comet. In particular, it is the source of the gases and dust that are released to build up the coma and tail when a comet approaches the Sun. The coma and tail are enormous: typically the coma measures 100,000 kilometres or more in diameter, and the tail may extend about 100,000,000 kilometres in length. They scatter and continuously dissipate into space but are steadily rebuilt by the decay of the nucleus, whose size is usually in the range of 10 kilometres.

 The evidence on the nature of the cometary nucleus remained completely circumstantial until March 1986, when the first close-up photographs of the nucleus of Comet Halley were taken during a flyby by the Giotto spacecraft of the European Space Agency (Figure 3—>). Whipple's basic idea that the cometary nucleus was a monolithic piece of icy conglomerate (see above Modern cometary research (comet)) had been already well supported by indirect deductions in the 1960s and '70s and had become the dominant though not universal view. The final proof of the existence of such a “dirty snowball,” however, was provided by the photographs of Comet Halley's nucleus.

      If there was any surprise, it was not over its irregular shape (variously described as a potato or a peanut), which had been expected for a body with such small gravity (10⁻⁴g, where g is the gravity of the Earth). Rather, it was over the very black colour of the nucleus, which suggests that the snows or ices are indeed mixed together with a large amount of sootlike materials (i.e., carbon and tar in fine dust form). The very low geometric albedo (2 to 4 percent) of the cometary nucleus puts it among the darkest objects of the solar system. Its size is thus somewhat larger than anticipated: the roughly elongated body measures 15 by 8 kilometres and has a total volume of some 500 cubic kilometres. Its mass is rather uncertain, estimated in the vicinity of 10¹⁷ grams, and its bulk density is very small, ranging anywhere from 0.1 to 0.8 gram per cubic centimetre. The infrared spectrometer on board the Soviet Vega 2 spacecraft estimated a surface temperature of 300 to 400 K for the inactive “crust” that seems to cover 90 percent of the nucleus. Whether this crust is only a warmer layer of outgassed dust or whether the dust particles are really fused together by vacuum welding under contact is still open to speculation.

      The 10 percent of the surface of Halley's nucleus that shows signs of activity seems to correspond to two large and a few smaller circular features resembling volcanic vents. Large sunward jets of dust originate from the vents; they are clearly dragged away by the gases vaporizing from the nucleus. This vaporization has to be a sublimation of the ices that cools them down to no more than 200 K in the open vents. The chemical composition of the vaporizing gases, as expected, is dominated by water vapour (about 80 percent of the total production rate). The next most abundant volatile (close to 10 percent) appears to be carbon monoxide (CO), though it could come from the dissociation of another parent molecule (e.g., carbon dioxide [CO₂] or formaldehyde [CH₂O]). Following CO in abundance is CO₂ (close to 4 percent). methane (CH₄) and ammonia (NH₃), on the other hand, seem to be close to the 0.5 to 1 percent level, and the percentage of carbon disulfide (CS₂) is even lower; at that level, there also must be unsaturated hydrocarbons and amino compounds responsible for the molecular fragments observed in the coma. This is not identical to—though definitely reminiscent of—the composition of the volcanic gases on the Earth, which also are dominated by water vapour, but their CO₂:CO, CO₂:CH₄, and SO₂:S₂ ratios are all larger than in Comet Halley, meaning that the volcanic gases are more oxidized. The major difference may stem from the different temperature involved—often near 1,300 K in terrestrial volcanoes, as opposed to 200 K for cometary vaporizations. This may make the terrestrial gases closer to thermodynamic equilibrium. The dust-to-gas mass ratio is uncertain but is possibly in the vicinity of 0.4 to 1.1.

      The dust grains are predominantly silicates. Mass spectrometric analysis by the Giotto spacecraft revealed that they contain as much as 20–30 percent carbon, which explains why they are so black. There also are grains composed almost entirely of organic material (molecules made of atoms of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen).

      There is some uncertainty concerning the rotation of Halley's nucleus. Two different rotation rates of 2.2 days and 7.3 days have been deduced by different methods. Both may exist, one of them involving a tumbling motion, or nutation, that results from the irregular shape of the nucleus, which has two quite different moments of inertia along perpendicular axes.

      Scientific knowledge of the internal structure of the cometary nucleus was not enhanced by the flyby of Comet Halley, and so it rests on weak circumstantial evidence from the study of other comets. Earlier investigations had established that the outer layers of old comets were processed by solar heat. These layers must have lost most of their volatiles and developed a kind of outgassed crust, which probably measures a few metres in thickness. Inside the crust there is thought to exist an internal structure that is radially the same at any depth. Arguments supporting this view are based on the fact that cometary comas and tails do not become essentially different when comets decay. Since they lose more and more of their outer layers, however, the observed phenomena come from material from increasingly greater depths. These arguments are specifically concerned with the dust-to-gas mass ratio, the atomic and molecular spectra, the splitting rate, and the vaporization pattern during fragmentation.

      Before the Giotto flyby of Comet Halley, other cometary nuclei had never been resolved optically. For this reason, their albedos (albedo) had to be assumed first in order to compute their sizes. Techniques proposed to deduce the albedo yielded only that of the dusty nuclear region made artificially brighter by light scattering in the dust. In 1986 the albedo of Comet Halley's nucleus was found to be very low (A = 2 to 4 percent). If this value is typical for other comets, then 11 of 18 short-period comets studied would be between 6 and 10 kilometres in diameter; only 7 of them would be somewhat outside these limits. Comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 1 would be a giant with a diameter of 96 kilometres; 10 long-period comets would all have diameters close to 16 kilometres (within 10 percent). Since short-period comets have remained much longer in the solar system than comets having very long periods, the smaller size of the short-period comets might result from the steady fragmentation of the nucleus by splitting. Yet, the albedo may also diminish with aging. At the beginning, if the albedo were close to that of slightly less dirty snow (A = 10 percent), the nuclear diameter of long-period comets would come very close to that of the largest of the short-period comets. The diameters of new comets also have been shown to be rather constant and most likely measure close to 10 kilometres. Of course, these are mean “effective” diameters of unseen bodies that are all likely to be very irregular.

      The region around the nucleus, up to 10 or 20 times its diameter, contains an amount of dust large enough to be partially and irregularly opaque or at least optically thick. It scatters substantially more solar light than is reflected by the black nucleus. Dust jets develop mainly sunward, activated by the solar heat on the sunlit side of the nucleus. They act as a fountain that displaces somewhat the centre of light from the centre of mass of the nucleus. This region also is likely to contain large clusters of grains that have not yet completely decayed into finer dust; the grains are cemented together by ice.

The gaseous coma

 The coma, which produces the nebulous appearance of the cometary head, is a short-lived, rarefied, and dusty atmosphere escaping from the nucleus. It is seen as a spherical volume having a diameter of 10⁵ to 10⁶ kilometres, centred on the nucleus. The coma gases expand at a velocity of about 0.6 kilometre per second. This velocity can be measured from the motion of expanding “halos” triggered by outbursts in the nucleus, from the speed required to produce the Greenstein effect (see below), and from the fluid dynamics required to drag dust particles away at those places where they are observed in the dust tails. This expansion velocity, v, varies somewhat with heliocentric distance r: v = 0.58r^−0.5 (in kilometres per second, when r is in astronomical units). The light of the spherical coma comes mainly from molecular fragments that have been produced by the dissociation of unobserved “parent molecules” in a zone on the order of 10⁴ kilometres around the nucleus. This also is the approximate size of the zone where molecular collisions continue to occur; beyond that zone, the gas becomes too rarefied for such interaction to occur. The zone simply expands radially without molecular collisions into the vacuum of space. The parent molecules (e.g., those of water vapour, carbon dioxide, and hydrogen cyanide [HCN]) are generally not observed because they do not fluoresce in visible light. So far, only a few have been observed at millimetre or centimetre wavelengths by radio telescopes; many more are needed if they are to be regarded as the source of the various radicals and ions that have been detected (see Table—>).

 If the mixture of original parent molecules has been frozen out of thermodynamic equilibrium in the nuclear ices, many chemical reactions (chemical reaction) can still take place in the molecular collision zone. At the usually cold temperature of vaporization, the kinetics of fast ion-molecular reactions would prevail. The reactions might reshuffle the original molecules present in the nucleus into new parent species, which would be the ones subsequently photodissociated into observed fragments by solar light. (This complex situation is still far from being completely understood.) In turn, the observed fragments, after having absorbed and reemitted photons from the solar light several times, would photodissociate or photoionize (photo-ionization), which make them disappear from sight at the fuzzy limit of the light-emitting coma (typically 2–5 × 10⁵ kilometres). A composite list of all observed species in cometary comas and tails is given in the Table—>. It is based mainly on observations of the bright comets of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, including spacecraft results from Comet Halley.

 The organic radicals given in the Table—> were seen in cometary heads as visual or ultraviolet emission lines or bands. The exceptions were water vapour, along with hydrogen cyanide and methyl cyanide (CH₃CN); these species, which could be called parent molecules, were observed as pure rotation lines at radio frequencies. The metals—except for sodium (Na), which is observed in many comets—were seen as visual lines in Sun-grazing comets alone. They are assumed to result from the vaporization of dust grains by solar heat. Sodium is a volatile metal that is not unlikely to vaporize easily from dust grains at large distances from the Sun (more than 1 AU). The ions were seen in the visual or ultraviolet emission lines or bands at the onset of the plasma tail or detected by spacecraft. The silicate (silicate mineral) signature was found in infrared emission bands at the onset of dust tails. The occurrence of the silicate elements, as well as the presence of a rather large amount of organic compounds, was confirmed by the mass spectrometric analysis of dust grains during the Giotto flyby of Comet Halley.

      An extremely weak coma appeared in 1984 when Comet Halley still was 6 AU from the Sun. In February 1991, the Belgian astronomers Olivier Hainaut and Alain Smette detected a giant outburst from Comet Halley, which was already at a distance of 14.5 AU from the Sun and had the form of a fanlike structure in the direction of the Sun; this is the best case study to date. Rarely have comas been detected beyond 3 or 4 AU, where they are still quite small; they grow to a maximum near 1.5 AU and seem to contract as they approach closer to the Sun. This effect comes from the more rapid decay in solar light (by photoionization or photodissociation) of the visible radicals that emit the coma light. The discrete emission of light by cometary atoms, radicals, or ions is due to the selective absorption of sunlight followed by its reemission either at the same wavelength (resonance) or at a different wavelength (fluorescence). In 1941, Pol Swings (Swings, Pol) explained the peculiar appearance of some of the molecular bands in comets by the irregular spectral distribution of the exciting solar radiation owing to the presence of Fraunhofer lines (dark, or absorption, lines) in this radiation. The temporal variations that occur in the molecular bands as a comet approaches the Sun were explained quantitatively by the variable shift in the apparent wavelengths of the solar Fraunhofer lines due to the variable radial velocity of the comet. This is the so-called Swings effect. Later, the American astronomer Jesse Greenstein explained, by a differential Swings effect, the observed differences in the molecular bands in front of and behind the nucleus: the radial expansion velocity of the coma introduces a different shift forward and backward. This differential Swings effect is often referred to as the Greenstein effect.

      Exceptions to the resonance-fluorescence mechanism are known and are exemplified by the case of the emission of the “forbidden” red doublet of atomic oxygen at wavelengths of 6300 and 6364 angstroms. Such an emission cannot be excited by direct absorption of sunlight but is produced directly by the photodissociation of H₂O into H₂ + O (in the ¹D state) and, in an accessorial manner, of CO₂ into CO + O (in the ¹D state). The ¹D state is an excited state of the oxygen atom that decays spontaneously into the ground (lowest energy) state by emitting the forbidden red doublet, provided that it had not been quenched earlier by molecular collisions.

      The large atomic hydrogen halo detected up to 10⁷ kilometres from the nucleus is simply a large coma visible in ultraviolet (Lyman-alpha line). It is two orders of magnitude larger than the comas that can be seen in visible light only because the hydrogen atoms, being lighter, move radially away 10 times faster and are ionized 10 times more slowly than the other radicals.

Cometary tails

      The tails of comets are generally directed away from the Sun. They rarely appear beyond 1.5 or 2 AU but develop rapidly with shorter heliocentric distance. The onset of the tail near the nucleus is first directed toward the Sun and shows jets curving backward like a fountain, as if they were pushed by a force emanating from the Sun. The German astronomer Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (Bessel, Friedrich Wilhelm) began to study this phenomenon in 1836, and Fyodor A. Bredikhin of Russia developed, in 1903, tail kinematics based on precisely such a repulsive force that varies as the inverse square of the distance to the Sun. Bredikhin introduced a scheme for classifying cometary tails into three types, depending on whether the repulsive force was more than 100 times the gravity of the Sun (Type I) or less than one solar gravity (Types II and III). Subsequent research showed that Type-I tails are plasma tails (containing observed molecular ions as well as electrons not visible from ground-based observatories), and Types II and III are dust tails, the differences between them being attributable to a minor difference in the size distribution of the dust grains. As a result of these findings, the traditional classification formulated by Bredikhin is no longer considered viable and is seldom used. Most comets (but not all) simultaneously show both types of tail: a bluish plasma tail, straight and narrow with twists and nods, and a yellowish dust tail, wide and curved, which is often featureless.

      The plasma tail has its onset in a region extremely close to the nucleus. The ion source lies deep in the collision zone (typically 1,000 kilometres). It is likely that charge-exchange reactions compete with the photoionization of parent molecules, but the mechanism that produces ions is not yet quantitatively understood. In 1951 the German astronomer Ludwig Biermann predicted the existence of the solar wind (see above) in order to account for the rapid accelerations observed in plasma tails as well as their aberration (i.e., deviation from the direction directly opposite the Sun). The cometary plasma is blown away by the magnetic field of the solar wind until it reaches its own velocity—nearly 400 kilometres per second. This action explains the origin of the large forces postulated by the Bessel-Bredikhin theory. Spectacular changes observed in the plasma tail, such as its sudden total disconnection, have been explained by discontinuous changes in the solar wind flow (e.g., the passage of magnetic sector boundaries).

      In 1957 the Swedish physicist Hannes Alfven (Alfvén, Hannes) predicted the draping of the magnetic lines of the solar wind around the cometary ionosphere. This phenomenon was detected by the International Cometary Explorer spacecraft, launched by the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), when it passed through the onset of the plasma tail of Comet P/Giacobini-Zinner on September 11, 1985. Two magnetic lobes separated by a current-carrying neutral sheet were observed as expected. A related feature known as the ionopause was detected by the Giotto space probe during its flyby of Comet Halley in 1986. The ionopause is a cavity without a magnetic field that contains only cometary ions and is separated from the solar wind by a sharp discontinuity. Halley's ionopause lies about 4,000 to 5,000 kilometres from the nucleus of the comet. An analysis of all the encounter data indicates that a complete understanding of cometary interaction with the solar wind has not yet been achieved. It is well understood, however, that the neutral coma remains practically spherical. The solar wind is so rarefied that there are no direct collisions of its particles with the neutral particles of the coma, and, as these particles are electrically neutral, they do not “feel” the magnetic field.

 The source of the dust tail is the dust dragged away by the vaporizing gases that emanate from the active zones of the nucleus, presumably from vents like those observed on Comet Halley's nucleus (Figure 3—>). The dust jets are first directed sunward but are progressively pushed back by the radiation pressure of sunlight. The repulsive acceleration of a particle varies as (sd)⁻¹ (with linear size s and density d). For a given density, it thus varies as s⁻¹, separating widely the particles of different sizes in different parts of the tail. Studying the dust tail isophotes of varying brightnesses therefore yields the dust grain distribution. This distribution may peak for very fine particles near 0.5 micrometre (μm), assuming a density of two, as in the case of Comet Bennett; however, it falls off with s⁻ⁿ (with n ranging from three to five) for larger particles. This mechanism neglects particles much smaller than the mean wavelength of sunlight. Because such particles do not reflect light, they do not feel its radiation pressure. (They are not detected from ground-based observations anyway.)

      One of the major results of the Giotto flyby of Halley's nucleus was the detection of abundant particles much smaller than the wavelength of light, indicating that the size distribution does not peak near 0.5 μm but seems rather to grow indefinitely with a slope close to a⁻² for finer and finer particles down to possibly 0.05 μm (10⁻¹⁷ gram). The dust composition analyzers on board the Giotto and Vega spacecraft revealed the presence of at least three broad classes of grains. Class 1 contains the light elements hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen only (in the form of either ices or polymers of organic compounds). The particles of class 2 are analogous to the meteorites known as CI carbonaceous chondrites but are possibly slightly enriched in carbon and sulfur. Class 3 particles are even more enriched in carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur; they could be regarded as carbonaceous silicate cores (like those of class 2) covered by a mantle of organic material (similar to that of class 1) that has been radiation-processed. Most of the encounter data were excellent for elemental analyses but poor for determining molecular composition, because most molecules were destroyed by impact at high encounter velocity. Hence, there still remains much ambiguity regarding the chemical nature of the organic fraction present in the grains.

 Meteors (meteor and meteoroid) are extraterrestrial particles of sand-grain or small-pebble size that become luminous upon entering the upper atmosphere at very high speeds. Meteor streams have well-defined orbits in space. More than a dozen of these orbits have practically the same orbital elements as the orbits of the identical number of short-period comets. Fine cometary dust (interplanetary dust particle) consists primarily of micrometre- or sub-micrometre-size particles that are much too small to become visible meteors (they are more like cigarette smoke than dust). Moreover, they are scattered in the cometary tail at great distance from the comet orbit. The size distribution of cometary dust grains, however, covers many orders of magnitude; a small fraction of them may reach 0.1 millimetre to even a few centimetres. Because of their large size, these dust grains are almost not accelerated by the radiation pressure of sunlight. They remain in the plane of the cometary orbit and in the immediate vicinity of the orbit itself, even though they separate steadily from the nucleus. They sometimes become visible as an anti-tail—i.e., as a bright spike extending from the coma sunward in a direction opposite to the tail (Figure 4—>). This phenomenon occurs as a matter of geometry: it takes place for only a few days when the Earth crosses the plane of the cometary orbit. At such a time, this plane is viewed through the edge, and all large grains are seen accumulated along a line. The same grains scatter farther and farther away from the nucleus until some are along the entire cometary orbit. When the Earth's orbit intersects such an orbit (an event that occurs year after year at the same calendar date), these large grains produce meteor showers.

 Extremely fine cometary grains also may penetrate the Earth's atmosphere, but they can be slowed down gently without burning up. Some have been collected by NASA's U-2 aircraft at very high altitudes. Grains of this kind are known as Brownlee particles and are believed to be of cometary origin (Figure 5—>). Their composition is chondritic, though they show somewhat more carbon and sulfur than the CI carbonaceous chondrites, and their structure is fluffy with many pores. Similar grains were found in space during the space probe exploration of Comet Halley.

Cometary models

      As previously noted, the sandbank model of the cometary nucleus fell into disregard by the late 1950s and early 1960s and was supplanted by the dirty snowball (or icy conglomerate) concept. Much circumstantial evidence supported the latter, but confirmation was lacking until 1986, when the Giotto spacecraft returned detailed, close-up photographs of Comet Halley's nucleus. Yet, while these photographs corroborated the general idea of the model, they revealed that “dirty snowball” was in fact a misnomer because snow (even when dirty) is suggestive of something white or at least gray in colour. In actuality, the cometary nucleus proved to be pitch black owing to the large amount of very fine, black sootlike particles intermixed with the volatile ices (see above).

      Many variations of the icy conglomerate model have been proposed since the early 1980s, as, for example, the fractal model, rubble-pile model, and icy-glue model. These names, however, suggest only slightly different types of accretion of primordial particles; they all share common features—namely, irregular shape, heterogeneous mixture, and very low density because of cavities and pores. The existence of a crust or dust mantle of a different nature had already been proposed before the 1986 spacecraft encounter with Comet Halley for two reasons. First, cosmic-ray processing of the outer layers had been described by Leonid M. Shul'man of the Soviet Union (1972) and later advocated by Fred Whipple and Bertram Donn of the United States, while the outgassing of the outer layers by solar heat had also been assumed since the proposal of Whipple's model (1950). Second, detailed models of the formation and disruption of such mantles due to solar-radiation processing of the upper layers had been studied by Devamitta Asoka Mendis of the United States (1979) and M. Horanyi of Hungary (1984).

      An average heuristic model for the elemental abundances of the cometary nucleus was developed by the American astronomer Armand H. Delsemme in 1982. Delsemme computed the H∶C∶N∶O∶S ratios from ultraviolet and visual observations of atomic and molecular species in bright comets detected during the 1970s and deduced the abundances of metals from the chondritic composition of cometary dust. In this model, hydrogen was depleted by a factor of 1,000 with respect to solar or cosmic abundances, and carbon was depleted by a factor of 4 in the gaseous fraction. The results of the 1986 study of Comet Halley confirmed the average chemical model and showed that the carbon missing in the gas was actually present in the dust. Except for hydrogen (and presumably helium), it appears that all elements are roughly in cosmic proportions in comets in spite of their extremely low gravity (10⁻⁴ times that of the Earth). This emphasizes the pristine nature of comets. Unlike most bodies of the solar system, comets obviously have never been severely processed by any heating episode since their formation. If the accretion of comets occurred at very low temperatures, near absolute zero, the water ice in a newly formed comet must be amorphous. Idealized models show that the transition to cubic ice might be the cause of sudden flare-ups between 3 and 6 AU.

Origin and evolution of comets

      All observed comets make up an essentially transient system that decays and disappears almost completely in less than one million years. Since they all pass through the solar system, planetary perturbations (perturbation) eject a fraction of them into deep space on hyperbolic orbits and capture another fraction on short-period orbits. In turn, those that have been captured decay rapidly in the solar heat. Fortunately, there is a permanent source of new comets that maintains the steady state—namely, the outer margin of the Oort cloud. As explained above, these so-called new comets are those Oort-cloud comets whose perihelia have been brought down into visibility—i.e., into the inner planetary system where they display their spectacular decay through comas and tails. Comets within the bulk of the Oort cloud are unobservable, not only because they do not develop comas and tails but also because they are too far away.

Formation of the Oort cloud

      Any modern theory about cometary origins must first explain the origin of the Oort cloud. None of the comets observed today left the Oort cloud more than three or four million years ago. The Oort cloud is, however, gravitationally bound to the solar system, which it follows in its orbit around the Milky Way Galaxy. Therefore, it is likely that the Oort cloud has existed for a long time. The most probable hypothesis is that it was formed at the same time as the giant planets by the very process that accreted them. The Soviet astronomer Viktor S. Safronov developed this accretionary theory of the planetary system mathematically in 1972. According to his model, the planets originated from a disk or a ring of dust around the Sun, and cometary nuclei are nothing more than primordial planetesimals that accreted first and became the building blocks of the planets. From the accreted mass of the giant planets, Safronov predicted the correct order of magnitude of the mass of the Oort cloud, which was built up by those planetesimals that missed colliding with the planetary embryos and were thrust far away by their perturbations. In effect, the Oort cloud in this theory becomes the necessary consequence and the natural by-product of the accretion of the giant planets.

      Later in the 1970s the American astronomer A.G.W. Cameron developed a much more massive model of the protostar nebula, in which the comets accreted in a circular ring at some 1,000 AU from the Sun, which is far beyond the present limits of the planetary system. The primeval circular orbits were then transformed into the elongated ellipses present in the Oort cloud by mass loss of the primitive solar nebula. Both the Cameron and Safronov models put the origin of comets together with that of the solar system some 4.6 billion years ago. Plausibility is given to the general idea of accretion from dust disks by the existence of such disks around many young stars—a fact established by infrared observations in the 1980s and confirmed visually in at least one case (β Pictoris). Further support is found in clues derived from meteorites.

      Since the early 1980s, new ideas have been explored to determine whether the Oort cloud could be much younger than the solar system or at least periodically replenished. The role of the massive and dense molecular clouds that exist in interstellar space has been reexamined in different ways. Could comets have accreted in these clouds directly from interstellar grains? Mechanisms for later capturing them into the Oort cloud cannot be very effective, but the efficiency is not capital, and some possibilities have been proposed. Since the solar system itself was probably formed from the gravitational collapse of such a molecular cloud, it seems more likely that either comets or the interstellar grains that were going to accrete into comets followed suit during gaseous collapse and were put into the Oort cloud at the same time that the planets were being formed. Elemental isotopic ratios deduced from the Comet Halley (Halley's Comet) flyby have not brought about any conspicuous anomalies that could be attributed to matter coming from outside the solar system. So far, observational clues all favour the idea of cometary matter deriving from the same primeval reservoir as the stuff of the solar system, but it must be recognized that the evidence remains weak.

Possible pre-solar-system origin of comets

      Telltales based on the chemical constitution of cometary nuclei as well as on the evolution of their orbits suggest that the origin of comets goes back beyond that of the planets and their satellites. Two scenarios are among the likeliest possibilities. In the first, comets had already accreted in all dense molecular clouds of the Milky Way Galaxy by the agglomeration of interstellar grains covered by a frost of organic molecules that cemented them together. Later, such a cloud collapsed to form the solar system. In the second scenario, dense molecular clouds were not able to accrete their frosty interstellar grains into larger bodies. When one of these molecular clouds collapsed to form the future solar system, however, the interstellar grains did likewise and eventually formed a dusty disk around the central star—the proto-Sun. Accretion into objects of 10-kilometre diameter is more likely in dusty disks of this type. The outer grains of the disk had not lost their frost, and some of them were ejected into the Oort cloud during the accretion of planetesimals into giant planets after some very moderate processing by heat. It is hoped that one day, space probes will secure data that will make it possible to determine whether frosty interstellar grains have lost their identity or can still be recognized as pristine and unaltered objects in cometary dust.

      Comets seem to be the most pristine objects of the solar system, containing intact the material from which it was formed. Included are the hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur atoms needed to build the volatile molecules present in the terrestrial biosphere (including the oceans and the atmosphere). Comets also seem to be the link between interstellar molecules and the most primitive meteorites known—the carbonaceous chondrites. The molecules required to initiate prebiotic chemistry (e.g., hydrogen cyanide, methyl cyanide, water, and formaldehyde) are present in interstellar space just as they are in comets; larger prebiotic chemistry molecules (e.g., amino acids, purines, and pyrimidines) occur in some chondrites and possibly in comets. An early cometary bombardment of the Earth, predicted in some accretion models of the solar system, may have brought the oceans and the atmosphere, as well as a veneer of the molecules needed for life to develop on the Earth. Comets could well be the link between interstellar chemistry and life.

Armand H. Delsemme

Additional Reading

General introductory works are John C. Brandt and Robert D. Chapman, Introduction to Comets, 2nd ed. (2003, reissued 2005); Jacques Crovisier and Thérèse Encrenaz, Comet Science: The Study of Remnants From the Birth of the Solar System, trans. from the French by Stephen Lyle (2000); Armand H. Delsemme, “Whence Come Comets?” Sky and Telescope, 77(3):260-264 (March 1989), an elementary discussion on their origin; Fred L. Whipple and Daniel W.E. Green, The Mystery of Comets (1985); and Robert D. Chapman and John C. Brandt, The Comet Book: A Guide for the Return of Halley's Comet (1984), a historical treatment. Brian G. Marsden and Gareth V. Williams, Catalogue of Cometary Orbits, 16th ed. (2005), covers 2,221 cometary orbits, with detailed references and notes; a complementary work is Gary W. Kronk, Cometography: A Catalog of Comets, 2 vol. (1999–2003). More-advanced works are R.L. Newburn, Jr., M. Neugebauer, and J. Rahe (eds.), Comets in the Post-Halley Era, 2 vol. (1991), containing reviews, summaries, and scientific papers by about one hundred authors; and K.S. Krishna Swamy, Physics of Comets, 2nd ed. (1997). Donald K. Yeomans, Comets: A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore (1991), is a comprehensive reference book on all cometary apparitions, full of anecdotes and highly recommended.Armand H. Delsemme

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