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KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- A comet that has unexpectedly brightened in the past couple of weeks and now is visible to the naked eye is attracting professional and amateur interest.

Paul Lewis, director of astronomy outreach at the University of Tennessee, is drawing students to the roof of Nielsen Physics Building for special viewings of Comet 17P/Holmes.

The comet is exploding and its coma, a cloud of gas and dust illuminated by the sun, has grown to be bigger than the planet Jupiter. The comet lacks the tail usually associated with such celestial bodies but can be seen in the northern sky, in the constellation Perseus, as a fuzzy spot of light about as bright as the stars in the Big Dipper.

''This is truly a celestial surprise,'' Lewis said. ''Absolutely amazing.''

Until Oct. 23, the comet had been visible to modern astronomers only with a telescope, but that night it suddenly erupted and expanded.

A similar burst in 1892 led to the comet's discovery by Edwin Holmes.

''This is a once-in-a-lifetime event to witness, along the lines of when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 smashed into Jupiter back in 1994,'' Lewis said.

Scientists speculate the comet has exploded because there are sinkholes in its nucleus, giving it a honeycomb-like structure. The collapse exposed comet ice to the sun, which transformed the ice into gas.

''What comets do when they are near the sun is very unpredictable,'' Lewis said. ''We expect to see a coma cloud and a tail, but this is more like an explosion, and we are seeing the bubble of gas and dust as it expands away from the center of the blast.''

Experts aren't sure how long the comet's show will last, but estimate it could be weeks -- if not months. Using a telescope or binoculars help bring the comet's details into view, they said.

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Information from: The Knoxville News Sentinel, http://www.knoxnews.com

Comet Draws Scientific, Amateur Interest, NYT, 3.11.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Brighter-Comet.html

May 24, 1910

Halley's comet,

seen from a Whit-week train

From the Guardian archive

Tuesday May 24, 1910

Guardian

Halley's comet, writes a correspondent, was very clearly visible last night as I travelled from Crewe to Manchester.

Looking out at the left-hand side of the carriage all the way from Crewe to within a mile or two of Stockport, when the haze swallowed it up, we could see the pale light of it, almost level with the eye below Leo and to the right of Castor and Pollux.

The tail was scarcely visible. A crowded carriage of returning holiday-makers found it a good butt for the a last round of holiday jests.

"Tail fourteen million miles long, has it; shouldn't like to walk it."

"How do they measure it - with a foot rule?"

"Algebra," snapped a man in the corner, and the rest were silent. It was surprising how many seemed to know where to look for it.

Last night the long-looked-for comet was visible at last to us in the north. In Manchester itself the haze which the smoke-stacks of industry gather over the city hid it from view, but out in the country parts of Lancashire and Cheshire the sky was beautiful and clear, and the brilliance of a moon reaching its full was not enough to blot it from sight.

From the rising of the stars it hung there (so those who saw it tell us), just clear of the mists on the fields, pallid and strangely blurred beside the shining definiteness of Castor and Pollux to the right of it and the great constellation of Leo sprawling over its head.

Its unfamiliarity made it easy for the eye to light upon it, but it was very dim and distant, and there was nothing but a faint luminosity about the edge to suggest to the naked eye the tail through which our planet had gone swimming in the past week.

But because its fires glow pale and faint to us here we are not to think that two thousand years (so far we can trace back its appearances in history) have burnt it out. In America and other parts of the globe it has shone with all its former brilliance, accompanied by the same strange bout of terrestrial ecstasy and panic as it had in days gone by.

When the time comes no doubt each country will fit its appearance to their special catastrophes, and in history books centuries after this Frenchmen will read that its coming was heralded by the flooding of their capital, and Englishmen will say that it killed a king.

And last night returning Whit-week travellers peered at it from railway carriage windows and joked about the length of its tail.

From the Guardian archive > May 24, 1910 > Halley's comet,
seen from a Whit-week train,
G,
Republished 24.5.2006,
https://www.theguardian.com/news/1910/may/24/
mainsection.fromthearchive

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