Реферат: Кометы

Реферат: Кометы

Comets can be spectacular objects seen in the night-time sky. They have been

associated by the superstitious with disasters and other notable historical

events. Until the 1986 opposition of Halley's comet, the true nature of a

comet's nucleus was the subject of argument amongst astronomers. The passage

of the Giotto probe close to the nucleus of Comet Halley and the many

observations that were carried out worldwide have vastly improved our

knowledge of the nature of comets.

Because comets can be seen so easily, records of the observation of comets

can be traced back over many centuries. It was from a study of the historical

observations of several comets that Halley, using Newton's new theory of

gravitation, showed that the orbits of several comets around the Sun were

almost identical. He postulated that they were all the same object and

predicted that it would be seen again at a certain time in the future. As we

know, Halley's comet did reappear around the predicted date and has been seen

since then on each of its journeys in towards the Sun.

Comets, as seen from the Earth, appear to have some sort of nucleus which is

surrounded by a bright, more or less circular region called the ‘coma’ from

which one or more tails may be seen spreading out away from the direction to

the Sun. These tails when photographed can be seen to be different colours.

There is often a filamentary structured tail which is bluish and a series of

more amorphous tails which are yellowish. The supposed nucleus of the comet is

the bright centre of the coma. The coma and the tails develop markedly as the

comet gets closer to the Sun with tail lengths sometimes growing as long as 100

million kilometres.

The Orbits of Comets

The first computation of cometary orbits was made by Halley, as mentioned

above. Since then the orbits of many hundreds of comets have been determined.

They almost all fall into two types; periodic orbits, which take the form of

very eccentric ellipses, and parabolic orbits.

The orbits of many comets have periods ranging from hundreds of years to tens

of millions of years, indicating that they spend much of the time far outside

the orbits of Neptune and Pluto. The orbits of the long-period comets are not

confined to a plane, like the orbits of the planets, and these comets can

appear in any part of the sky. In order to explain the orbits of comets,

astronomers have postulated the existence of two groups of comets on the

edges of the solar system:

The Oort Cloud:

In 1950, Dutch Astronomer Jan Oort proposed that a large, spherical cloud of

comets surrounds the solar system. The Oort Cloud is supposed to be almost 1

light year in radius and could contain up to a trillion small, icy comets.

Small perturbations to the very slow motions of these bodies will cause one

of them to start its long, slow journey towards the inner solar system under

the gravitational pull of the Sun. The orbit of such a body will be a

parabola with the Sun as its focus. As the comet gets closer to the Sun its

velocity increases reaching a maximum at its closest point whereupon is

starts its journey back out to the outer reaches of the solar system, never

to be seen again. The Oort Cloud has never been observed, only theorised, but

its existence would explain the orbits of long period comets, which have

orbital periods greater than 200 years.

Sometimes, during its journey through the solar system, a comet may pass

close to one of the major planets. If this encounter is a close one then the

gravitational pull of the planet will dramatically change the comet's orbit

and can alter the parabolic orbit into a closed, elliptical orbit. The comet

the becomes a periodic comet with a definite period for its returns close to

the Sun. Halley's comet is the best known example of such a comet. The

existence of periodic comets, with orbital periods less than 200 years, led

to the proposal of a second source of comets:

The Kuiper Belt:

The Oort Cloud does not explain the existence of comets which have orbital

periods of 200 years or less. In 1951, astronomer Gerald Kuiper suggested

that another belt of comets existed beyond the orbit of Neptune, between 30

and 50 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.5 thousand million km) from the Sun. In

1988, a group of astronomers at the University of Hawaii and the University

of California at Berkeley began searching for Kuiper Belt objects using a

2.2m telescope in Hawaii. They discovered the first Kuiper Belt object in

1992. Subsequent observations from Hawaii and with the Hubble Space Telescope

have discovered dozens of icy objects, each a few hundred km in size and with

orbital periods of a few hundred years. The Kuiper Belt may be composed of

comets from the Oort Cloud, which have been deflected into smaller orbits by

Jupiter or the other outer planets.

A few comets have very short period orbits. For example, Comet Encke has a

period of 3.5 years, the shortest known, which places its orbit inside the

orbit of Jupiter. It is generally thought that these inner solar system

comets originated in the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt but passed close

enough to one of the giant planets to be deflected by its gravitational pull

into a much smaller orbit.

The Cometary Nucleus

Until the Giotto probe showed us pictures of the nucleus of comet Halley there

was considerable discussion of the nature of a comet's nucleus. We now know

that the nucleus is small, about 10-20 kilometres across, is irregular in shape

(rather like a peanut), and is almost black. From it jets of gas and dust are

forced out by the Sun's radiation. We believe that under the black skin there

is a solid body composed of ices of various kinds, including water-ice, dry-ice

(made of carbon dioxide), ammonia, methane and many other organic carbon

compound ices all mixed together with dust. The dust contains silicates, carbon

and carbon compounds.

The Cometary Coma

Surrounding the nucleus is the bright coma. This is composed of gas and dust

which has been expelled as the Sun evaporates the icy nucleus. The parent

molecules are mainly split up by energetic ultraviolet radiation from the Sun

into simple compounds. These are not necessarily like stable chemicals that we

know on the Earth but are simple combinations of atoms. For example, some of

the most numerous are CN, C2, OH, C3, H2O

+ and NH2. These are broken down pieces of larger

chemicals, such as water (H2O) and organic carbon compounds.

The expelled gas and dust form a roughly spherical ball around the nucleus.

This is many times larger than the nucleus - the coma of a bright comet can be

millions of kilometres in size, whereas the nucleus is only 10km or so across.

The coma of the Great Comet of 1811 was larger than the Sun.

The action of the Sun's radiation and the magnetic field associated with the

solar wind remove gas and dust from the coma and it is ‘blown’ away to form the

comet's tail.

The Tails of a Comet

The gas which is blown away from the coma is ionised by solar radiation and

becomes electrically charged. It is then affected strongly by the magnetic

fields associated with the solar wind (a stream of charged particles expelled

by the Sun). The gas tail is made visible by line-emission from the

excitation of the gas by the Sun's radiation. This gives the gas tail its

characteristic blue colour. The geometric shape of the tail is governed by

the magnetic structures in the solar wind but predominantly the gas tail

points directly away from the direction from the comet to the Sun.

The dust is blown away from the coma by radiation pressure from the sunlight

absorbed by individual dust grains. It moves in a direction which is governed

by the motion of the comet, by the size of the dust particles and by the

speed of ejection from the coma. The dust tail can be complex, multiple and

even curved but, in general, will point away from the Sun. Sometimes, due to

projection effects, part of the dust tail can be seen pointing in a sunward

direction. This is just due to the fact that the comet and the Earth are

moving and that part of the tail has been ‘left behind’ in such a place as to

appear to point towards the Sun. The dust tail is yellow because it reflects

the Sun's light to us.

The gas tail can be about 100 million km long while the dust tail is around

10 million km long. The longest observed tail on record is the Great Comet of

1843, which had a tail that was 250 million km long (greater than the

distance from the Sun to Mars!).

The Names of Comets

A comet takes the name of its discoverer, or discoverers. It also has a serial

number consisting of the year and a letter designation. In this way all comets

are named uniquely. Halley's comet is one of very few exceptions to the naming

rule. Halley did not discover ‘his’ comet but has the honour of having his name

attached to it because of his pioneering work in determining the orbits of

comets and showing that this comet was periodic.

Prediction of Comets

Apart from the periodic comets, whose orbital periods are well known and

hence whose returns can be predicted with great accuracy, it is impossible to

predict when comets may be seen in the sky. Most of the brightest and most

spectacular comets have been ones which have appeared only once and have

never been seen again. When a comet is discovered, far from the Sun, it is

very difficult to predict how bright it will appear when it comes close to

the Earth and the Sun. Some comets seem to emit a lot of gas and dust and

produce long and spectacular tails whereas others only produce a small amount

of gas and dust and have almost no tail at all.

Name	Orbital Period	Perihelion Date	Perihelion Distance
Halley	76.1 yrs.	1986-02-09	0.587 AU
Encke	3.30 yrs.	2003-12-28	0.340 AU
d'Arrest	6.51 yrs.	2008-08-01	1.346 AU
Tempel 1	5.51 yrs.	2005-07-07	1.500 AU
Borrelly	6.86 yrs.	2001-09-14	1.358 AU
Giacobini-Zinner	6.52 yrs.	1998-11-21	0.996 AU
Grigg-Skjellerup	5.09 yrs.	1992-07-22	0.989 AU
Crommelin	27.89 yrs.	1984-09-01	0.743 AU
Honda-Mrkos-Pajdusakova	5.29 yrs.	1995-12-25	0.528 AU
Wirtanen	5.46 yrs.	2013-10-21	1.063 AU
Tempel-Tuttle	32.92 yrs.	1998-02-28	0.982 AU
Schwassmann-Wachmann 3	5.36 yrs.	2006-06-02	0.937 AU
Kohoutek	6.24 yrs.	1973-12-28	1.571 AU
West-Kohoutek-Ikemura	6.46 yrs.	2000-06-01	1.596 AU
Wild 2	6.39 yrs.	2003-09-25	1.583 AU
Chiron	50.7 yrs.	1996-02-14	8.460 AU
Wilson-Harrington	4.29 yrs.	2001-03-26	1.000 AU
Hale-Bopp	4000 yrs.	1997-03-31	0.914 AU
Hyakutake	~40000 yrs.	1996-05-01	0.230 AU