Ninety miles outside Phoenix, Bopp and his astronomy club were out stargazing as usual. The 47-year-old Bopp, who worked in the parts department of a concrete manufacturer, didn’t own a telescope. He just loved the star-quilted darkness and kept coming to the desert despite the locals who mistook him for a coyote and shot at him. Bopp’s friend Jim Stevens had brought along his own telescope. They took turns exploring near Sagittarius. Stevens focused on the M70 cluster, but by the time it was Bopp’s turn, M70 had changed position in the sky. Bopp saw only a “faint glow.” It was the same comet Hale was observing, out beyond the orbit of Jupiter, 577 million miles from Earth. To receive credit, Bopp, like Hale, knew he had to notify the Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams at the Harvard-Smithsonian Observatory. But his cell phone didn’t work here in the middle of nowhere. So he headed home. At a truck stop, he begged Western Union to actually telegram the bureau, but Western Union had no address. Only when he was back near Phoenix did he get a cable out. The next day, the call came from Harvard. “Congratulations,” Bopp was told. “You’ve discovered a new comet.”
So will the rest of the world over the next month. Hale-Bopp (a.k.a. Comet C/1995 01)–spectacular and sublime, mysterious and wonderful-is poised to give Earth’s entire Northern Hemisphere a once-in-a-lifetime cosmic performance. For scientists, it’s manna from heaven. For romantics, it’s a link to the past, a chance to see something last seen in these parts 4,200 years ago (following story). And for the reality-challenged, it’s a portent of doom. Comet Hale-Bopp is already visible in the predawn, and insomniacs and Hale-Bopping astroheads have been enjoying it for months. But this week and continuing into April, Hale-Bopp’s 48,000-mile-per-hour path will take it into evening prime time.
Call it the dinnertime comet, thoughtfully showing up between dessert and “Seinfeld?‘Right after sunset, in the northwestern sky, Hale-Bopp’s distinctive head and diaphanous tail should be out in full regalia-without any need for a telescope or binoculars, and unmistakable even in light-polluted cities. By the end of the month, when it comes closest to Earth–122 million miles-Hale-Bopp will be 23 degrees up in the sky, higher than most horizons, brighter than virtually any star and as long as a jelly bean. Indeed, in places like Seattle and Minneapolis-above 45 degrees north latitude-the comet will never set through April 6. “it’s a wow comet, larger than anything else that’s come across Earth’s orbit in our lifetime,” says astronomer Carolyn Shoemaker, who has discovered more comets (82) than anybody else alive.
THERE HAVE BEEN COMETary disappointments in recent memory. The hype notwithstanding, Kohoutek arrived cometose in 1978 and, 18 years later, Halley’s flopped. Comets by nature are unpredictable. They’re big, frozen dirt-bails-an estimated 100 billion of them, each typically no more than a few miles wide-created at the same time as the sun and the planets. Most of their days, comets float anonymously in a halo called the Oort Cloud, a backwoods of space way past Pluto. But once in a while, gravitational jolts from passing stars send a comet hurtling from the kingdom of ice into a trip around the sun. It may be a permanent orbit or, if the comet is going fast enough, it may escape the solar system altogether.
As the comet warms up, it smiles. Some of its volatile ingredients vaporize to form a giant cloud of gas, which is the head or “coma,” and what makes the comet visible from so far away. The tail is a silver trail of exhaust, stretching out for millions of miles. A comet’s size and composition, its prior ports of call, how much dust from deep space has entrusted it, its radiant heat-these are the variables that determine if it puts on a light show. So far, Hale-Bopp has met all expectations and even intensified in brightness. For it to be seen two years ago by Hale and Bopp, it had to be huge, about four times the size of Halley’s. “I’ve studied comets. for a long time,” says Prof. Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology, “and I’ve never seen anything as exciting as this one.”
Scientists know that comets, apart from their sheer beauty, may provide chemical clues to the origins of the planets. Comets are the wandering children of the solar system - they were present at the creation some 4.6 billion years ago and, living in the cold storage of the outer solar system, haven’t changed much. Planetary researchers, analyzing wavelengths of light, have already discovered molecules in Hale-Bopp not seen in other comets; this could help establish whether the water in Earth’s oceans and other organic compounds came from crashing comets. Astronomers won’t be able to set the Hubble telescope on Hale-Bopp during its closest approach to the sun, because direct sunlight would damage it. But NASA will use its Ulysses probe, launched in 1990 and traveling on the same latitude as Hale-Bopp, to study solar wind as the comet slingshots around the sun.
The comet may also leave a trail of dollars. In Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., the weeklong “Comet Cruise” departs on Easter Sunday. Heineken plans an “Out of This World” ad campaign in England. At all 150 stores of The Nature Co., salesclerks are wearing yellow ribbons proclaiming HALE-BOPP: ASK ME HOW TO SEE IT! Their answer: spend $199 for a 60-mm telescope and tripod. Celestron, one of the country’s leading telescope makers, says sales are up $0 percent this year. “There’s been great media hype from things like ‘Star Wars’ and last year’s Comet Hyakutake,” says Celestron president Alan Hale. (No relation.) “And now, Hale-Bopp.”
The Interact is a buzz these days with apocalyptic conspiracy theories and tales of extraterrestrial invasion connected to the comet’s end-of-the-millennium visit. (Why are aliens invariably malevolent? Maybe they’re friendly, bearing campaign contributions.) At last month’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in Seattle, participants were greeted at the airport by this billboard: AAAS: TELL THE TRUTH ABOUT HALE-BOPP! THE ALIENS ARE COMING. And how will they get here? Certainly not aboard the comet, since that would be preposterous. No, the theory runs, they’re on a luminous “Saturn-like object” (SLO) that’s really an alien mothership following in Hale-Bopp’s shadow. Intrigue about that ship creseen-doed in November when an amateur astronomer from Houston “revealed” on a popular late-night radio show that he had photos proving there was an SLO. Hale, among others, took to debunking the story and was promptly denounced online as “an Earth traitor.” Eventually, the alien spacecraft was shown to be nothing more than an eighth-magnitude star (SAO 141894, if you must know). Not all were convinced.
Comets have always fascinated the earthbound. Accounts of these cosmic apparitions can be found in the histories of the oldest civilizations. They’re a constant not just in astronomy but in literature and the history of science. “Disaster” is a rough translation from the Greek and Latin for “bad star.” Comets have been blamed for earthquakes and floods, Caesar’s assassination and the death of Charlemagne. These days, says Mary Kara, owner of the Psychic Eye in Los Angeles, “I’ve been seeing comets come into my readings about 90 percent of the time.”
Ultimately, the magic of comets may be their ability to transcend time. “Technology has shortened our sense of the future,” says Danny Hillis, one of the ranking technology wizards at Disney. “Our ancestors thought in the long term. They built cathedrals they knew their grandchildren and their grand-children’s grandchildren would enjoy.” Comets are snapshots of celestial seasons–ancient yesterdays, a distant tomorrow. Each one comes racing out of the darkness of space for a momentary visit and then flies off, only to be seen again (if at all) by another generation. “This is the stuff that reminds us of our ancestors around the campfires, when the sky was an intimate friend, full of wonder,” says Paul Saffo, a technology forecaster with the Institute for the Future in northern California. “We haven’t left our superstitions behind. Standing alone at night under the sky, our modem, technological culture melts away and we’re taken back to the campfire.”
This comet won’t be back for about 2,400 years, give or take rash-hour traffic. With luck, Hale’s and Bopp’s names will still be firmly attached. Their present prospects are shakier. Hale has made about $7,000 from speeches and a book, and is still trying to raise money for a research institute. Bopp is unemployed. “I can find another job,” he says, “but this is something that happens once in 10,000 life-times.” Hail, then, to the humans who noticed it, and hail and farewell to a comet that won’t return till 4897.
