Hale-Bopp
Welcome One and All to my site!!!
This site is dedicated to the Comet Hale-Bopp and will include a program that I have written and any other relevant information.
Hale-Bopp as a Comet!!!
Comets are chunks of frozen ice, gasses and rocky debris orbiting the Sun. The word comet comes from the Greek word KOMETES meaning `hairy one' referring to the comet's tail. Comets also have a dark solid core surrounded by a coma, which is created when a comet comes near the Sun. The Sun's heat vaporises the comet's icy material into a cloud of gaseous material. The comet's orbital path contains a trail of dust and particles streaming out from the coma away from the Sun. The core and the coma are the constituent parts of the comet's head, which is seen as a glowing ball moving steadily through the sky.
"Comets are remnants of the formation of our solar system and the observations of Hale-Bopp indicated that the comets from the Oort cloud were originally part of our system's ancient proto-planetary disk" (NASA/GSFC, 1999.)
However, this is not the case for Hale-Bopp. This comet was formed in the region between Jupiter and Neptune according to observations of the amount of water and CO contained within the comet (NASA/GSFC, 1999.)
Seven astronomical units out from the Sun, a comet was discovered and named Hale-Bopp. This comet was exceptional due to the fact it already had an unusually bright coma, which consisted mainly of dust. Eventually, this comet became the brightest observed in the twentieth century. It has also been calculated, by looking at the layer thickness of crystalline ice, that Hale-Bopp is fairly unevolved (D.Prialnik, 1998.)
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