“Why won’t the gravitation of the comet pull us into it?” Ted asked.
“That’s because a comet has very little mass, or what we’d call real body, to it. It’s mostly a big lump of widely scattered gas particles.”
“How big is it?” Jill asked.
“The head is almost as big as Luna, and it has a tail many thousands of miles long,” her father answered. “It’ll pass us at hundreds of miles a second, but it will take a long time to get by and will hardly seem to be moving.”
When the day of the arrival of the comet’s nucleus came, every eye on the Shooting Star was peering intently out the windows of the rocket ship. The commander had ordered all windows covered with filter screens to cut out the blinding glare of the nucleus.
The comet arrived with the shocking brilliance of a gigantic fireball. All Ted could see was an over-all blinding whiteness that made the blackness of space like bright noonday. The stars were blotted out completely in the glare. For hours the brilliance continued without letup, and then it began to dim.
“The head is past,” Dr. Kenton said. “From now on, the light will grow weaker and weaker as the tail goes by.”
Ted still could make out no detail of any kind, and this was disappointing. As he and Jill and Randy kept their eyes glued to the window, all they could see was a slow dimming of the comet’s original brilliance. They grew weary of the sight and turned away from it. When they returned to it many hours later, the heavens had a strange bluish cast, and the stars began to burn through it weakly.
Still later, only the barest evidence of the celestial body remained. The heavens were only slightly grayed, showing that the tip of the tail alone had not passed.
“Will we see the comet after it swings around the sun, and heads out into space again?” Ted asked.