Passing Through Tail of Pons-Winnecke Comet

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 86, 2 July 1927, Page 24

Passing Through Tail of Pons-Winnecke Comet

A FLAMING sky traveller, with a -^ L fearsome name, is rushing toward us and, if the astronomers have made no mistake in their figures, will lash us with its fiery tail of poisonous gas. Yet no one seems to be making any end-of-the-world talk or getting the least bit excited over an event that once would have thrown people into a wild panic of anxiety and dread. This, calm view prevails because present-day astronomers have assured us that there is no danger of this comet, or any other comet, giving us a deadly gassing, much less running smack into us.

Comets are mostly luminous gas, science tells us, aud the deep blanket of atmosphere that covers the earth is ample' protection against them and their poisonous trains. Any comet coming close enough to pass through our atmosphere would burn itself out from friction and the worst to expect, we are told, w*ould be a harmless and spectacular shower of shooting stars. This comet that is paying us this unusually neighbourly visit is the socalled Pons-Winnecke Comet, which was discovered in 1819, and it has been making visits every six years for no one knows how long. It is called the

Doomsday Comet—and sometimes the End-of-the-World Comet—because on its last visit in 1921 some few scientists thought it was coming too close for comfort. And that time it was some four million miles farther away than this coming approach which we do not even view with alarm. In the past the Doomsday Comet has kept at a respectful distance and could be seen only with the aid of a

telescope, but this time it is swishing by us a mere astronomical hand’s breadth away—somewhere between three and four million miles, according to the latest computations.

This will be the first such comet to burn in the heavens since the spectacular return of Halley’s Comet in 1910.

In ancient times the appearance of a comet in the heavens was taken as a sure sign of terrible things to happen. People ran into the streets and crowded the house tops wailing prayers against the hour of destruction.

In the Middle Ages, and even in early modern times, the arrival of a comet was all that was needed to start thousands of people feverishly closing up their worldly affairs in preparation for the crash of doom.

The oldest cuneiform inscriptions of Babylon, which were made several thousand years before the dawn of the Christian era, carry the record of a comet that flamed in the sky for 29 consecutive nights, striking fear into the hearts of the people. Later, historians advanced the opinion that this was the evil omen that preceeded the Deluge.

More than two centuries later the ancient star-gazers of Chaldea saw a comet which they thought foretold the confusion of tongues during the building of the Tower of Babel. The fall of Troy and the abduction of the beautiful Helen was, if we may believe the historian Hyginus, accompanied by a star that “rushed alone the heavens toward the Arctic pole, where the star remained visible with dishevelled hair.”

The whole adventurous life of Hannibal, the great Carthagenian soldier, seems to have been milestoned by comets. In 184 8.C.—20 years after Hannibal suffered his first serious defeat —a comet is said to have burned over Asia Minor for S 8 nights “with a horrible lustre.” Soothsayers at the court of King Prusias of Bithynia, where Hannibal had fled to escape the vengeance of the Romans, told the king that this was an omen of Hannibal’s death. Whether it was or not, the Carthaginian warrior took the omen seriously and ended his life with a dose of poison.

So important a part did comets play in the affairs of Julius Caesar that he had a comet named for him (although astronomers have since identified the so-called “Caesar’s Comet” as Halley’s Comet). He was born into the world while the skies of Italy were aflame with a sky traveller, became dictator of Rome and crossed the Rubicon under