Abstract
READERS of NATURE will be glad to have a full report of the interesting popular lecture which Prof. Schiaparelli, the well-known Italian astronomer, gave in Milan on February 4, on the great comet of 1882. Referring to the national misfortune which had given origin to his and other lectures, he began by showing that while a connection between the comet and the inundations which wasted, in October 1882, many Venetian provinces, was not absolutely impossible, it was at least very impobable, both because the comet was yet a great distance from the earth when the floods rose, and from the difficulty of understanding why the supposed influence of the comet should have acted only on that little part of the globe. After this preamble M. Schiapirelli gave the public a rapid and elementary account of our planetary s)stem, and of the comet's trajectory during its passage near the sun and planets. The orbit of the comet, in the position which could be subjected to astronomical measurement, is parabolic, in a plane inclined 30° or 40° to planes of the solar system. The greater portion of the orbit is in the southern regions for in the autral hemisphere the comet was sooner and better observed than in the boreal, where it never was very high above the horizon. The vertex of the parabola is very near the sun, and only when the comet was approaching to this position with an extraordinary rapidity, astrono ners could perceive it,—at Auckland (September 2), at the Cape of Good Hope, in Australia, the Argentine Republic, and Brazil. The direction of its movement was perhaps towards the sun; but the inconceivable rate which the comet acquired iii its falling towards the sun (480 kin, in a second, sixteen times the mean velocity of the earth in its orbit), and the lateral rush coming from it, were enough at that time to overcome the attractive power of the sun, and to hinder the great luminary from swallowing it. The attraction of the sun failed not to produce its effect, slackening successively its flight; hut being animated by this great velocity, the comet could escape in security to where the sun's action is very feeble, and whence it will not return for many years.
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PORRO, F. PROFESSOR SCHIAPARELLI ON THE GREAT COMET OF 1882 . Nature 27, 533–534 (1883). https://doi.org/10.1038/027533a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/027533a0