Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, September 18, 1995 TAG: 9509180106
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Knight-Ridder/Tribune|
DATELINE: DETROITI LENGTH: Medium
And some astronomers predict its amazing glow will light up Earth's night sky in March 1997.
Discovered July 23 by professional astronomer Alan Hale and amateur Thomas Bopp, Hale-Bopp could be the brightest comet of the century, say some stargazers, though others are more circumspect.
Whatever happens, amateur and professional astronomers are buzzing about the new comet. The Internet is packed with pictures and information about the glowing iceball.
``If it lives up to its potential, it will be the kind of comet that you can walk out your back door with a beer in your hand, look up and say, `Wow!,''' said Hale, who spotted the comet from his back yard in Cloudcroft, N.M.
Bopp, who saw the comet while with friends near his home in Phoenix, said he's hoping for a big show. ``I think it's going to be bright and appear a foot long in the sky,'' he said. ``I'm very excited. It's big and it appears stable.''
Astronomer Daniel Green of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass., said the comet is still very far from the sun and a lot could happen.
``We're predicting it will be as bright as the brightest stars in the sky,'' he said. ``It could be much brighter than that, or it could fizzle into nothing.''
Comet Kohoutek disappointed the public in January 1974 when, after months of media hype, it made an uneventful, rather dim pass. Two years later the media shied from stories about Comet West, which then lived up to astronomers' predictions, appearing bright in the night sky and dragging its tail a quarter of the way across the sky.
Zdenek Sekanina, astronomer and researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, said Hale-Bopp is very active, experiencing outbursts that make it brighter. ``But we don't know when it will run out of fuel for the outbursts so we cannot say for certain how bright it will be in 1997.''
Astronomers agree the comet is large. Its core extends as much as 90 miles and its coma - the glowing ball surrounding the core - is estimated at 600,000 miles across. It is already bright enough to be seen with small telescopes, which is very unusual for a comet so far away.
by CNB