C / 1664 W1

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C / 1664 W1 [i]
The comet of 1664 [1]
The comet of 1664
Properties of the orbit ( animation )
Epoch:  4th December 1664 ( JD 2,329,162,483)
Orbit type parabolic
Numerical eccentricity 1.0
Perihelion 1.026 AU
Inclination of the orbit plane 158.7 °
Perihelion 4th December 1664
Orbital velocity in the perihelion 41.6 km / s
history
Explorer
Date of discovery November 17, 1664
Older name 1664
Source: Unless otherwise stated, the data comes from JPL Small-Body Database Browser . Please also note the note on comet articles .

C / 1664 W1 was a comet that could be seen with the naked eye in 1664 and 1665 . Due to its extraordinary brightness, it is counted among the " Great Comets ".

Discovery and observation

This comet is said to have been seen for the first time in Spain on the morning of November 17, 1664 . For the first time ever, detailed observations of a comet were made in Spain: An anonymous manuscript (possibly written by the Jesuit Joseph Zaragoza ) contains the data of several observers from Spain, France and Italy (including Gilles-François de Gottignies from the Collegio Romano in Rome) over a period of time from December 14, 1664 to March 20, 1665.

Chinese astronomers saw the comet for the first time on November 18, and on December 16 a 5 ° long tail is reported pointing to the northwest. There are also reports from Korea and Japan . In Japan, the 12-year-old boy Matasaburou described his unusually detailed observations in Kōchi in a diary illustrated with drawings . It wasn't rediscovered and published until the 1980s.

Christiaan Huygens observed the comet from December 2nd in Leiden , his observations were recorded in a dissertation by Pierre Petit . Johannes Hevelius observed and described him from the middle of the month in Danzig, Giovanni Domenico Cassini and Geminiano Montanari in Italy, Adrien Auzout and Pierre Petit in France, Robert Hooke and Samuel Pepys in England and Stanislaus Lubienietzki in Hamburg.

The French Jesuit François-Joseph Le Mercier first saw the comet on the morning of November 29 in Québec . He carried out position determinations, observed a tail length of 27 ° on December 27, and was able to observe the comet until January 15.

Samuel Danforth from New England wrote a work in which he reported on his observations of the comet of 1664/65. He reported a 20 ° long tail .

The comet developed the greatest length of its tail towards the end of December. Isaac Newton , then a student at Cambridge , reports a tail length of 34 or 35 degrees on December 27th. His observations of the comet induced him to begin studying astronomy.

In the course of January 1665, the comet moved away from the sun and earth again and therefore became weaker. By mid-January the tail had shrunk to 14 °. Newton last saw the comet on February 2, Hevelius last saw it on February 13. But he imagined that he had seen him again on February 18, this alleged sighting subsequently led to a heated argument among astronomers. Cassini could see him until February 21st.

The comet reached a magnitude of −1 mag on December 29th .

Superstition

The comet from 1664 in the constellation Raven

The appearance of the comet has been observed by many people across Europe. As was customary at the time, it sparked the wildest fantasies among ordinary people, and it was seen in a flood of writings as the ominous harbinger of various calamities and as a reminder sent by God. Amazingly, these writings contain both astronomically precise representations of the comet's orbit and superstitious predictions right next to one another.

In retrospect, this comet was held responsible for the Great Plague of London that broke out in 1665 and the Great Fire the following year. In Tyrol it was seen as a portent for the death of Archduke Sigismund Franz von Habsburg on June 25, 1665 in Innsbruck .

Scientific evaluation

Scholars and scientists took the appearance of the comet as an opportunity to intensify their research and philosophical discussions about the nature of comets. In England, Christopher Wren and John Wallis observed the comet of 1664 and developed theories about cometary motion, for which they assumed rectilinearity and uniform velocity. Lubienietzki wrote his Theatrum Cometicum , in which the observations of the comet by great European scholars, including Henry Oldenburg , Johannes Hevelius , and Athanasius Kircher , are recorded on elaborate copperplate engravings.

Danforth wrote one of the first works on astronomy to be printed in America in 1665. He explained the various phenomena with a profound knowledge of contemporary knowledge of comets: the comet is a celestial body on the other side of the moon; it does not consist of fire, but its tail arises from the reflection of sunlight on the vapors from its head; the tail always points away from the sun; it moves with a uniform motion. He even suggested that it moves in an elliptical orbit, although the very observation of this comet, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli, led to the conclusion that the orbit of non-periodic comets is parabolic .

The observation that Hevelius claims to have made of the comet on February 18 was flawed, the comet could no longer be found with the naked eye, but Hevelius believed to have seen it at a point that related to its movement on Heaven both before and after that date could not have been possible. He published his observational results that same year in his Prodromus cometicus , whereupon Auzout believed he had to defend his observational results (which were in agreement with those of Cassini, Gottignies and others), which he did in a letter to Petit, who in turn to Hevelius wrote. Hevelius did not give in, however, but insisted on his supposed sighting. He did everything in his power to dispel the allegations against him by contradicting the observations made by the other astronomers and eventually claiming that Cassini, Auzout and the others had a different comet from February 13 to March 19 observed as the one who appeared from December to February 18.

Hevelius' observation could have been identified as flawed by the numerous other observations in Italy, Spain, France, England, etc., but if this had not been possible, his flawed data could have hampered the understanding of cometary motion for a long time.

Edmond Halley was the first to be able to calculate orbital elements for the comet in 1705 ; Lorenz Lindelöf came to almost the same results in 1854.

Orbit

For the comet, due to the few observations made, it was only possible to determine a parabolic orbit with limited precision , which is inclined by around 159 ° to the ecliptic . It thus runs in the opposite direction (retrograde) like the planets through its orbit. At the point of the orbit closest to the sun ( perihelion ), which the comet passed on December 4, 1664, it was located at a distance of 153 million km from the sun in the area of ​​the earth's orbit . Already over a year earlier, on October 4, 1663, it had passed very close to the planet Jupiter at a distance of only 29.5 million km, and on August 14, 1664, it passed Mars at a distance of about 102 million km.

After its perihelion, the comet approached Earth on December 29, 1664 to about 0.17 AU / 25.5 million km. This close proximity to the earth was also the reason for its observed brightness.

The very close passage of Jupiter in October 1663 had far-reaching effects on the comet's orbital elements . It can be assumed with high probability that before this passage through the inner solar system it was a long-period comet in an elliptical orbit with an orbit period of a few thousand years. However, due to the approach to the giant planet in particular, the eccentricity of its orbit was increased by about 0.004, but due to the uncertain initial data, no statement can be made whether the orbit is now definitely elliptical and how long the orbit time is. The comet is unlikely to return to the inner solar system, or will return many tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

See also

literature

  • Ch. Nottnagel : Thorough report / From that bit into February of the 1665th year / imported comets found in the sky / And the presumably remarkable significance. Wittenberg, 1665.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ J. Th. Theyner: Actual illustration of the erröcklichen Comet = Sterns /… . Frankfurt, 1664.
  2. ↑ a b A. G. Pingré: Cométographie ou Traité historique et théorique des comètes . Tome II, Paris, 1784, pp. 10-22.
  3. ↑ S. Renshaw, S. Ihara: The Tiger Tail Star - Matasaburou and Comet C / 1664 W1. Retrieved April 3, 2018 .
  4. ^ RG Thwaites (Ed.): The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents - Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France 1610-1791 . Vol. L, 1999, pp. 68-79. ( HTML; 524 kB )
  5. ^ A b S. Danforth, P. Royster (Ed.): An Astronomical Description of the Late Comet or Blazing Star; As it appeared in New-England in the 9th, 10th, 11th, and in the beginning of the 12th Moneth, 1664. Together with a Brief Theological Application thereof. (1665) An Online Electronic Text Edition . Faculty Publications, University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Paper 37, 2006. ( PDF; 443 kB )
  6. ↑ JE McGuire, M. Tamny: Newton's Astronomical Apprenticeship: Notes of 1664/65 . In: ISIS , Vol. 76, No. 3, 1985, pp. 349-365. ( JSTOR 232857 ).
  7. ^ GW Kronk: Cometography - A Catalog of Comets, Volume 1. Ancient - 1799 . Cambridge University Press, 1999, ISBN 978-0-521-58504-0 , pp. 350-357.
  8. ↑ Donald K. Yeomans: Comets - A Chronological History of Observation, Science, Myth, and Folklore . Wiley, New York, 1991, ISBN 978-0-471-61011-3 .
  9. ^ Donald K. Yeomans: NASA JPL Solar System Dynamics: Great Comets in History. Retrieved June 17, 2014 .
  10. ↑ Anonymous: Kurtzverfaſſter Hiſtoriſcher report / All those comets / so within a hundred years /… itſs published . 1664.
  11. ^ Ian Ridpath: A Brief History of Halley's Comet - Understanding comets. Retrieved July 4, 2014 .
  12. ↑ PM Hollaus: Heavenly Horrors . austria franciscana, No. 8, pp. 91–97, 2011. ( PDF; 486 kB )
  13. ↑ http://polona.pl/item/238631/
  14. ↑ http://bibliodyssey.blogspot.de/2007/03/comet-book.html
  15. ↑ Michal Choptiany: The theater of cosmic and human history. Retrieved July 14, 2014 .
  16. ^ JH Westphal: life, studies and writings of the atronome Johann Hevelius . Königsberg, 1820, pp. 87-88.
  17. ↑ C / 1664 W1 in the Small-Body Database of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (English).Template: JPL Small-Body Database Browser / Maintenance / Alt
  18. ↑ SOLEX 11.0 A. Vitagliano. Archived from the original on September 18, 2015 ; accessed on May 2, 2014 .