Friday, March 6, 2015

COMETS- THE HAIRY STARS



COMETS- THE HAIRY STARS


Imagine you are out on a romantic date with your beau to the city outskirts. Both of you beneath the starry sky and then a beautiful comet passes by. What will you do?

I remember a similar scene from a Bollywood movie (Ajab Prem ki Ghazab kahani) where the heroine( Katrina Kaif) closes her eyes and wishes for her love to be successful with hands held tight.

How romantic, right?




Wrong. Infact I would call it asinine, stupid. I pity her for closing her eyes instead of seeing and enjoying the rare occurrence.

How can a comet make your dreams come true? After all, it is a dirty snowball lost its way home in the space and wandered crying into our solar system. Wake up ppl and chase your dreams..


This is one of the several myths regarding comets.

Lets ask our ancestors about more of them.

We were born into a mystery. We awakened on this tiny world beneath a blanket of stars, like an abandoned baby left at a doorstep without a note to explain who we are, where we came from. We are supposed to figure it all by ourselves.

Luckily, we are gifted with pattern recognition. Ancient humans were able to distinguish between things: prey from predator, poisonous plants from nourishing plants.     

They used this gift to study the pattern of stars. They predicted the occurrence of seasons and thereby followed appropriate survival strategy. Everything was going well for them until one day.

The day, the apparition of a comet happened in the space. They had absolutely no idea what was happening. Almost invariably, they concluded that the news was not good. They believed something bad was going to happen. This marked the beginning of myths and fears regarding comet sightings.

It doesn’t matter whether you were an ancient Aztec, Anglo-Saxon, Babylonian or Hindu, comets were always the portents of doom. The only difference among them is the precise nature of disaster it was believed to cause. To some it meant famine, to some it meant war, to others it meant disease. A certain ancient society showed its uniqueness: To it, it specifically meant “small pox”.

Interestingly, “dis-aster” in greek means “bad star”. No wonder they had such superstitions.
It is surprising to notice that most of the science related names were originated from Greek language. Infact the name “comet” is also derived from Greek which means “hair”.

Whaaaaat!! Why did they name it after hair?

Here the creativity of greeks comes into picture. They viewed the comet as a star with long hair. Kudos to their creativity.

Lets see some other comet myths.

To the ancient Rome, it meant the death of a leader. A falling star (as a comet appeared to them) is believed equivalent to a falling emperor. A comet once appeared during the reign of Nero. A foolish astrologer in his courtship referred to it as a blazing star which is after the death of Nero. To cool that blazing star, he resorted to the massacre of his entire successorship as a sacrifice.



Apart from such tragic incidents, there are some funny incidents also in our history.

In 1910, people panicked when a comet passed through Earth’s path around the Sun. In Chicago, people sealed their windows to protect themselves from the comet’s poisonous tail. Others committed suicide. Special "Comet Protecting Umbrellas," gas masks, and "anti-comet pills" were sold.

Good job by the marketing people then. They took the maxim “Make hay while the sun still shines” way too seriously..


Do you know dinosaurs? If not, go watch the jurassic park series. Scientists believe that a comet collided with earth and killed all the dinosaurs.


Two minutes silence for all the dinosaurs.R.I.P.

One possibility is that a comet about 10 kilometers in size struck the Earth. Scientists think that the impact disrupted the environment by displacing great amounts of dirt and rocks into the air.

To keep it simple, imagine a huge rock of the size of the Mount everest travelling 10 times faster than the fastest bullet, hitting the ground.

There is a 65-million-year-old crater from an impact of similar magnitude just off the coast of Mexico in the Yucatan Peninsula.



There are two kinds of people out there: common citizens and celebrities. Likewise, there are some celebrity comets apart from others.

Comet Hale-Bopp ( named when people wondered “arey bapp rey’’ on seeing it)

Comet Swift tuttle ( named after Taylor Swift by her fan)

Comet Hyakutake ( I cant even pronounce it…arghh…japanese)

Halley comet    ( I know it…Edmond halley, scientist)

Shoemaker levy-9( I think you can figure out how it came) J

Everything is fine. If all these are myths, what is the truth? What are these comets in the first place? Why they keep on rambling in the space? Why cant they stick their ass at one place like many other stars?

For answers, Stay tuned. Don’t go away. I ll be right back. ( sry, been watching crime news too much these days).

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