The transformation of motion into heat, and the combination of the cometary gases with the oxygen of our atmosphere might produce a conflagration, or a general poisoning of the atmosphere.
And it was thus, under the name of cometary orb, that the seventh child of the Sun was announced.
They come to us from a vast distance, from millions on millions of miles, and circle in swarms around the Sun, following a very elongated ellipse which closely resembles that of the cometary orbit.
The inclination of the plane of the cometary orbit to the plane of the ecliptic, an angle which is generally considerable, but in this case the planes were proved to coincide.
Between the brilliant circular semi-ring and the head, the cometary substance seemed dark, very rare, and very diaphanous.
Its practical value was illustrated by the brilliant researches of Halley oncometary orbits.
The question at issue was nothing less than the creation of a new era in cometary astronomy, or the casting of a reproach upon science, the consequences of which it would long continue to feel.
Then it was elaborated by Zollner, and particularly by Bredichin, of the Moscow observatory, into what has since been regarded as the most plausible of cometary theories.
Discarding the crude notions of cometary impact and volcanic eruption, Laplace filled up the gaps in the hypothesis with the aid of well-known laws of gravitation and motion.
So thickly is the space we traverse strewn with this cometary dust that the earth sweeps up, according to Professor Newcomb's estimate, a million tons of it each day.
After such fiascos the cometary train could never again pose as a world-destroyer.
So widely are the individual particles separated that the cometary body as a whole has been estimated to be thousands of times less dense than the earth's atmosphere at sea-level.
Nebulae are vast cometary clouds, with particles more or less widely separated, giving off gases through meteoric collisions, internal or external, and perhaps glowing also with electrical or phosphorescent light.
What a story it tells of the myriads of cometary victims that have fallen prey to the sun since first he stretched his planetary net across the heavens!
Yet these felicities of explanation must not make us forget that the chemical composition attributed to the first type of cometary trains has, so far, received no countenance from the spectroscope.
Electricity alone seems competent to produce the varieties of cometary emanation they were designed to account for.
This was at first so vividly continuous, that the characteristic cometarybands could scarcely be detached from their bright background.
It need not, however, be inferred that cometary materials are really in a state of combustion.
They gave him a virtually identical situation for the new planet with that derived from the clustering of cometary aphelia.
The typicalcometary orbit, apart from disturbance, is parabolic--that is to say, it is indistinguishable from an enormously long ellipse.
When beyond the limits of the atmosphere they applied the full current, and were soon once more cleaving the ether at cometary speed, their motion towards the sun being aided by that great body itself.
As the reappearance of the comet was calculated by the application of the Newtonian Law of Gravitation, such a result only gave added confirmation to the application of that law to cometary bodies.
Thus the philosophic mind of Herschel saw in the existence of cometary tails, the irrefutable evidence of the existence of a repulsive force, not of a hypothetical character, but as real as the existence of gravity itself.
Roche was one of those who stated that the phenomena of cometarytails was due to the repulsive power of heat, which found its origin in the heat of the sun.
In order to account for the existence of the tails of comets, various repulsive forces have been introduced from time to time into the solar system, so that the phenomena of cometary tails might be satisfactorily accounted for.
This conception of the origin and development of a comet will also account, and that on a logical and philosophical basis, for another fact which is associated with cometary phenomena.
We shall see later that Herschel also had a clearer view ofcometary phenomena, and of the forces which played a part in those phenomena, than any of his contemporaries, when we deal with the origin and motions of all comets.
It lies in the path, certainly defined and determined by observers, of a small cometary mass, which will plunge upon it a rain of rock and iron.
The impact from the first arrivals of the cometary body upon the outer envelopes of the Martian atmosphere had begun.
The small eccentricities of the orbits of the planets and satellites, as contrasted with the great eccentricities of the cometary orbits.
The great majority of cometary orbits are classed as parabolic; and it is ordinarily inferred that they are visitors from remote space, and will never return.
But they also appear to be acted upon by powerful repulsive forces emanating from the sun, to which is due the remarkable phenomenon of cometary tails.
Kepler's main reasoning as to the existence of a law for cometary movement was right; but his secondary reasoning, that comets move nearly in straight lines, was wrong.
It shook the very foundation of cometary superstition.
As early as the first half of the sixteenth century we hear Julius Caesar Scaliger protesting against the cometary superstition as "ridiculous folly.
For these features in cometary theory, see Pingre, vol.
Fromundus, at Louvain, the enemy of Galileo, steadily continued his crusade against all cometary heresy.
In fact, I do not know that he would require more than a small fraction of a horse-power to remove the cometary dust.
Let us fill a hollow sphere of this diameter with cometary matter, and make it our unit of measure.
Yet, when we consider the average inclination of the orbit, and not of its plane, we find that the major axes of nearly all known cometary orbits are very little inclined to the plane of the ecliptic.
Hence the necessity of changing the "Constant of Resistance" after perihelion, and this will generally be found necessary in all cometary orbits, if this theory be true.
In cometary astronomy we shall find much to substantiate these views.
It has not indeed proved practically available; but his system of calculating cometary perturbations by means of "mechanical quadratures" has formed the starting-point of all subsequent researches on the subject.
My Genius has placed the more exalted spiritual natures in cometary worlds, and this last fiery revolution may be produced by the appulse of a comet.
My power extends so far as to afford you a glimpse of the nature of a cometary world.
Was it a collection of nebulous, or cometary matter, which the earth encountered in its annual progress?
I was present at the Paris Observatory, and was fully convinced, as were also Matthieu and the late Bouvard of the dissimilarity in the intensity of the light seen in the polariscope, when the instrument received cometary light.
It would be difficult to conjecture what the consequences might be, were our planet transported to either of these extremes of the cometary path.
On the third, however, the cometary fragment was found, and its motion accurately measured.
Before entering the solar domain, they were doubtless members of a cometary system.
Halley soon after undertook a thorough discussion of all the recorded cometary observations within his reach.
At one of these epochs the cometaryorbit will probably undergo considerable transformation.
That numerous facts--some observed in ancient and some in modern times--have been decidedly indicative of cometary disintegration.
As the sun in its progressive motion approaches a cometary group, the latter is drawn toward the centre of our system; the nearer members with greater velocity than the more remote.
A fewcometary orbits are hyperbolas, more ellipses, and a still greater number parabolas.
Accordingly we find, by examining a table ofcometary elements, that with a perihelion distance less than 0.
The most remarkable event, however, in the recent history of cometary astronomy was its assimilation to that of meteors, which took unquestionable cosmical rank as a consequence of the Leonid tempest of November 1833.
Cometary science has ramified in unexpected ways during the last hundred years.
Cometary records of a vague kind go back in China to 2296 B.
For a full account of the wonders of the cometary world the reader is referred to books on descriptive astronomy, or to monographs on comets.
From the point of view of the importance of finding out the divergence of a cometary orbit from a parabola, its period, and its aphelion distance, this increase of range attains the very highest value.
Cometary astronomy is now largely indebted to photography, not merely for accurate delineations of shape, but actually for the discovery of most of them.
Herschel, added to the number, and in 1878 gave a list of seventy-six coincidences between cometary and meteoric orbits.
But the case is very different when we deal with the actual cometary orbits.
We have, indeed, on more than one occasion, actually witnessed the violent disturbance of a cometary orbit.
The hydrocarbon bands are, however, not always the only features visible in cometary spectra.
We must recollect that the veil drawn between the cluster and the telescope was not a thin curtain; it was a volume of cometary substance many thousands of miles in thickness.
Indeed, in certain cases, jets of cometary material are actually projected towards the sun.
The lightest haze that ever floated in a summer sky would do more to screen the stars from our view than would one hundred thousand miles of such cometary material as was here interposed.
Their eccentric and irregular paths may undergo the most enormous derangements; indeed, the history of astronomy contains many instances of the vicissitudes to which a cometary career is exposed.
The planets might experience considerable derangements from cometary attraction, and yet in the lapse of time those disturbances would neutralise each other, and the permanence of the system would be unaffected.
Now the predominance of highly inclined cometary orbits, may be gathered from the following table, compiled by M.
The small eccentricity of the orbits of the planets and satellites, as contrasted with the great eccentricity of the cometary orbits.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "cometary" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word.
