Here Comes A Comet

Greetings Everyone!

You all have seen that magic, right? That one where the magician puts their archetypal hat on the table, then wraps a cover around it, sometimes waves a wand, and out comes a healthy rabbit? We know it's not exactly magic. Misdirection is every magician's forte. 

Nature is also sort of a magician Herself. No, She doesn't conjure rabbits or doves out of thin air. Except once in a while, She sends in something out of the world, literally. You can say it's a glowing space rabbit. As in the former case, the rabbit is always under the table, this ''space rabbit'' lurks right below our noses. Until Nature pulls them out of Her hat, we don't see them.

Yet when they finally come to light, other than rejoicing, we run away in fear. I mean, we used to run, but not anymore. 

Almost since time immemorial, comets have appeared in our night skies. And until modern times, virtually all of humanity, save for some eclectics, have shied away from them. And why wouldn't they? As far as they could recall, they lived under an unchanging sky. Apart from the seasonal turn of the constellations and those wandering stars (planets), their heavenly firmament stood immutable. The night sky does change. Over hundreds of thousands of years to millions, familiar constellations become lost cousins, adrift across the vast heavens. But on human timespans, the sky stays the same. Try imagining yourself in those remote times. You've lived your entire life under the never-changing night sky. Now, what if, one fine day, moments after sundown, you notice a peculiar streak of light stuck in place close to where the Sun has just set? As you inform your father about the ghastly apparition, you see his eyes turning pale, and he warns you not to look in that direction, for the last time that evil thing shone, the village elder passed away. And in his father's father's time, it didn't rain for twenty moons after that light in the east. And now that the light appears many moons later, another elder descends into a violent fit. Speaking of a time eons before the advent of modern astronomy, and without men like Aristotle, Galileo, Kepler, Newton, Halley, and others alike, comets came as a bad omen. Edmund Halley and Sir Isaac Newton, drawing upon their ideas of gravitation and that of their predecessors, Johannes Kepler and Galileo, discovered that comets were some fuzz-ball objects that have their origins beyond the Moon, and one particular candidate was actually periodic, returning every 75-76 years. Through rigorous calculations, Halley found that the comet of 1531 and 1607 were the same object. As such, he predicted its return sometime around 1758. Sadly, Edmund Halley didn't live long to see his calculations come true. He had already left this realm 16 years earlier, in 1742. Immediately after its appearance on December 25, the comet got Halley's name. For 200,000 years, Halley's comet has been swinging by the Sun every 74 - 79 years and will continue to do so for a greater length of time. 

From the mid-eighteenth century, with the advancement of astronomy, fear of comets slowly divulged away. From a species hiding in fear, willingly sacrificing a [virgin] girl in the pretext of seeing an unfamiliar light in the sky, we evolved into a species sending probes and landers to those very objects that, at some obscure moment in our distant past, highlighted our lowliest profiles.

 ''Knowledge is the antidote to fear'', that's Ralph Waldo Emerson.  

Okay then. Please welcome Comet Nishimura. 

Comet Nishimura as seen from Spain on August 25, 2023.
Credits: SomeAstroStuff 
Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons. 

On August 12, amateur astronomer Hideo Nishimura discovered what is now officially comet C/2023 P1 Nishimura. As it swings by the Sun, it's believed to reach naked-eye brightness in the coming days, sometime around September 12. The comet is on a hyperbolic trajectory, which will take it too close to the Sun. But the problem is, the closer a comet comes to the Sun, the higher its risk of disintegrating under the star's blistering heat and radiation. In case it survives, from what it seems, it'll leave the solar system, only to return after some 437 years or never. 

When I started my blog, I wrote an article on the 2020 comet, Neowise. I've updated it just in case so you can have a refresher. Here's the link - A Peek into the Life and Death of a Comet.

Hasta la Vista!