C / 1811 F1 (Great Comet)

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C / 1811 F1 (Great Comet) [i]
The Comet of 1811 (drawing by WH Smyth)
The Comet of 1811
(drawing by WH Smyth )
Properties of the orbit ( animation )
Period:  September 5, 1811 ( JD 2,382,760.5)
Orbit type long-period
Numerical eccentricity 0.9951
Perihelion 1.035 AU
Aphelion 423.7 AU
Major semi-axis 212.4 AU
Sidereal period ~ 3095 a
Inclination of the orbit plane 106.9 °
Perihelion September 12, 1811
Orbital velocity in the perihelion 41.3 km / s
history
Explorer Honoré Flaugergues
Date of discovery March 25, 1811
Older name 1811 I.
Source: Unless otherwise stated, the data comes from JPL Small-Body Database Browser . Please also note the note on comet articles .

C / 1811 F1 (also called the Great Comet of 1811 and Comet Flaugergues ) was a comet that could be seen with the naked eye in 1811 . Due to its extraordinary brightness, it is counted among the " Great Comets ".

Discovery story

When this comet was discovered by Honoré Flaugergues in Viviers on the evening of March 25, 1811, deep on the horizon, it was still more than 2.7 AU from the Sun in the asteroid belt . It was moving rapidly north in the sky, and Flaugergues was able to observe it on the following evenings until April 1st.

On April 11th, Jean-Louis Pons , who had not heard of the discovery, accidentally found the comet again and was able to determine a position. Even Franz Xaver von Zach watching him that night in Marseille . For the remainder of April and through May, the comet was already freely visible.

In June, Johann Karl Burckhardt succeeded in calculating a first parabolic orbit from the observation data, from which Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers concluded that the comet would become very bright in the course of October. Towards the end of May, however, it was temporarily difficult to observe, as it was now standing low in the sky and entering twilight . The last observations before the comet passed the sun from Earth were made by Flaugergues on May 29th, Zach on June 2nd, José Joaquín Ferrer y Cafranga in Havana on June 15th and Alexander von Humboldt in Paris on June 16th .

Further observations

Position of the great comet between August 1811 and January 1812 (map after Adolf Stieler from 1840)

After the comet moved away from the sun for observers on earth, Flaugergues was able to see it again for the first time on August 18, albeit again very close to the horizon. Olbers found him telescopically on the morning of August 22nd and Johann Elert Bode in the evening of the same day. The following morning Bode saw a short tail for the first time . Less than a week later, Olbers described it as 3 ° long and recognized two conspicuous lateral bands in parabolic shape that surrounded the invisible cometary core .

In the course of September the comet could also be seen in the night sky , where many people saw it for the first time. Wilhelm Herschel observed in Glasgow an 11–12 ° long tail that was curved at the end. On October 6th he already saw a 25 ° long tail, after which the observed tail lengths decreased again.

The comet of 1811 over Sankt Goar and Katz Castle

Alexis Bouvard and Giuseppe Piazzi tried with the help of the more recent observations a better parabolic orbit determination , while the first as yet imprecise elliptical orbit was only calculated by Flaugergues in October. Shortly afterwards Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel was able to determine more precise orbit elements .

On November 4th, William John Burchell in South Africa described the comet as a "faint nebulous star of 3 mag ". On November 5, Herschel reported a tail of 12.5 °, and on November 19, only about 6 ° long. From the middle of December, the lateral bands could no longer be distinguished. From the beginning of 1812 the comet, which was moving south again in the starry sky, became weaker and harder to observe. Zach last saw him on January 11th.

Seen from earth , the comet passed the sun for the second time on February 9, and from mid-February the distance between the sun and comet in the sky increased again. In March Ferrer calculated elliptical orbital elements of the comet, which showed that it would be seen again in the night sky in June and August because the earth would come close to it again to around 3 AU, as at the beginning of the year. He looked for him with a refractor from the beginning of July , found him on the morning of July 11th and was able to pursue him until July 15th. Later he was seen by Vincent Wisniewsky in Novocherkassk , who compared his brightness on August 12 with a star of 11 mag. The last time he saw it was on August 17, when the comet was already more than 4.5 AU from the Sun.

Almost 17 months had passed since the discovery. At the time, this was the longest period of time over which a comet could ever be observed .

The comet reached a magnitude of 0 on October 20th .

Orbit

From the observation data over a period of 505 days, Norbert Herz was able to determine an elliptical orbit for the comet in 1892 , which is inclined by around 107 ° to the ecliptic . The comet 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 traversed on September 12, 1811, it was about 154.9 million km from the sun in the area of ​​the earth's orbit . Already on August 22nd it had approached Venus within 99 million km, while on October 16 it reached the closest approach to Earth with 1.22 AU / 182.7 million km. This is an unusually long distance to Earth for a Great Comet, only two other Great Comets did not come closer than 1 AU, namely C / 1807 R1 and C / 1995 O1 (Hale-Bopp) .

The comet moves on an extremely elongated elliptical orbit around the sun, which is almost perpendicular to the orbits of the planets. Such an orbit is relatively stable over a long period of time as there are no approaches to the large planets. According to the railway elements , which are afflicted with a certain degree of uncertainty, it could have appeared in antiquity around the year –930. During the last passage through the inner solar system in 1811, its orbital eccentricity was increased slightly by 0.0003 and its semi-major axis from about 196 AU to about 207 AU, so that its orbital time increased somewhat. When it reaches the point of its orbit furthest from the sun ( aphelion ) around the year 3290 , it will be about 61.7 billion km from the sun, almost 413 times as far as Earth and almost 14 times as far as Neptune . Its orbit speed in the aphelion is only about 0.11 km / s. The comet's next perihelion passage may occur around the year 4800.

Effects on the zeitgeist

Reception in literature

  • Jean Paul was inspired by the comet of 1811 to write his last great novel, The Comet .
  • Johann Peter Hebel wrote a literary reminiscence of the comet in his calendar work Der Rheinländiſche Hausfreund or New Calendar for the year 1813 .
  • The Russian writer Lev Nikolajewitsch Tolstoy processed the comet Flaugergues literarily in his work War and Peace . In the middle of the work he described how the person Pierre observes the comet.
  • Jules Verne wrote in 1878: "The Great Comet of 1811 ... was the reason why the year of its appearance is commonly known as 'the year of the comet' ..."
  • In the eighth book of the Polish national epic Pan Tadeusz by Adam Mickiewicz the comet is mentioned and regarded by the Lithuanian people as a messenger of an imminent war.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gary W. Kronk : Cometography: C / 1811 F1 (Great Comet). Retrieved July 28, 2014 .
  2. ^ DAJ Seargent: The Greatest Comets in History: Broom Stars and Celestial Scimitars . Springer, New York, 2009, ISBN 978-0-387-09512-7 , pp. 129-131.
  3. a b G. W. Kronk: Cometography - A Catalog of Comets, Volume 2. 1800-1899 . Cambridge University Press, 2003, ISBN 0-521-58505-8 , pp. 19-28.
  4. ^ Donald K. Yeomans: NASA JPL Solar System Dynamics: Great Comets in History. Retrieved June 17, 2014 .
  5. N. Herz: Determination of the orbit of the great comet from 1811 . Vienna, 1892.
  6. C / 1811 F1 (Great Comet) in the Small-Body Database of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (English).
  7. SOLEX 11.0 A. Vitagliano. Archived from the original on September 18, 2015 ; accessed on May 2, 2014 .
  8. ^ JP Lever: The Comet of 1811. Retrieved July 28, 2014 .