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Natural History, March, 2008 by Joe Rao
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This past October, amateur astronomers were amazed by a weird transformation. For most of the month, Comet Holmes, more than 150 million miles from Earth, was no brighter than magnitude 17--about 25,000 times fainter than the faintest star that can normally be seen without any optical aid. But on October 23, the comet's visibility suddenly began to rocket. In less than twenty-four hours, Comet Holmes brightened by hundreds of thousands of times-all the way up to magnitude 2.5, bright enough to be seen with the naked eye even from some urban areas! Viewed in binoculars and telescopes, the comet's head--an expanding cloud of dust, the coma, enveloping a tiny, icy nucleus--appeared as a perfectly round, bright little disk. Within just a few weeks, the dust spread out so that the coma, though now faint, became the largest object in the solar system, with a diameter greater than that of the Sun.
Comet Holmes was originally discovered by Edwin Holmes, an English amateur astronomer, during a similar flare-up in November 1892. The comet is periodic, returning to the Sun's vicinity at roughly seven-year intervals (though astronomers actually lost track of it between 1906 and 1964). During the 2007 rendezvous, the comet passed closest to the Sun--191 million miles--back in May, and was moving away when the outburst occurred. Perhaps a rich vein of volatile ices on the comet's nucleus was suddenly exposed to sunlight. Another possibility is that the comet's nucleus consists of low-density material that, through outgassing over time, developed a large region with a very tenuous structure, comparable to a honeycomb. At some point, the fragile bonds connecting the honeycomb of material failed and a crushing collapse occurred. Such a collapse might have expelled a gigantic volume of sunlight-reflecting dust into space, making the dim comet suddenly appear impressively bright.
Joe RAO (hometown.aol.com/skywayinc) is a broadcast meteorologist and an associate and lecturer at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
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