Abstract
Let’s begin by describing comets as we currently understand them. In popular culture, as seems to have always been the case, comets are simply bad news. Modern entertainment media (and, sadly, some sensationalist news media) are fond of misrepresenting them. Cocooned in a growing nebula of gas and dust, their trailing tails growing longer night by night and they hang in the sky like the sword of Damocles. They possess an almost conscious intention to hit something—and that something is usually Planet Earth (Fig. 1.1).
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© 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland
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Grego, P. (2014). What Are Comets and Asteroids. In: Blazing a Ghostly Trail. The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01775-4_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-01775-4_1
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