Biology

On July 23, 1995 two different men sat in two different states. Each gazed up at the same night sky: one from a desert and one from his home. They peered through their telescopes and saw something they hadn't seen before. A faint glow caught their eyes in the Messier 70 (M70), part of the Sagittarius constellation. Each of these amateur astronomers tracked this object for hours and then reported the sighting of what would later be known as Comet Hale-Bopp(1).

Comet Hale-Bopp, discovered by Alan Hale of New Mexico and Thomas Bopp of Arizona, remains the farthest comet ever discovered by amateurs(10). It is made up of a nucleus consisting of dust, rock and ice (like most comets), also known as a 'dirty snowball' (8)., and orbits the sun at a rate of 11.4 hours(1). As Hale-Bopp moved closer to the sun the ice of the nucleus sublimated (turned from a solid into a gas without passing through the liquid state) and created a steam-like coma. In the case of a comet, a coma is the atmosphere surrounding the nucleus. This sublimation also creates the comet's two tails which stream away from the sun and are visible due to the reflection of the sun off of the dust particles(2).

The Hubble Space Telescope recorded the comet nucleus to have a diameter of approximately 40km or 25 miles(1). In whole, Comet Hale-Bopp is 2 million kilometers in size! (8). It is both extremely large and extremely bright, not to mention the most visible comet to be seen by the naked eye since 1977(1). At the time of its discovery, Comet Hale-Bopp was 666 million miles from the sun. It reached its closest point to the earth (122 million miles away) around March 22, 1997, and is possibly the most viewed comet ever(2).

There are many controversies surrounding Comet Hale-Bopp. One popular controversy is the argument of whether or not Hale-Bopp has a satellite. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope have some convinced that the subtle gravitational pull from the comet could have sucked a satellite...