A system of meteoric bodies such as I suppose to form a comet (I mean the comet as it exists in space before the generation of its tail, which is only formed as it approaches the sun) could not approach so near to the sun as did the present comet at perihelion, without encountering more or less of these furious blasts the flash of some of which have been seen to move with a measurable mean velocity of above 300 miles per second, and a probable maximum velocity sufficient to eject solid matter beyond the reclaiming grasp of solar gravitation.
It is evident that such a meteoric system as I suppose to constitute a comet would, in the course of a rapid perihelion flight crossing these outblasts, be liable to various degrees of ejection in different parts, that would disturb its original structure by blowing some of its constituents out of their orbits, or even quite away from the control of the feeble gravitation of the general meteoric mass, and thus effecting a rupture of the comet.
Now such a disintegration or dispersion of the present comet has been actually observed. Several able observers have described a breaking of the head of this comet shortly after its perihelion passage. Commander Sampson’s observations with the great 26-inch equatorial telescope of the Washington Naval Observatory are very explicit. On October 25 he saw the nucleus as a single well-defined globular body. On November 3, with the same telescope, he saw a triple nucleus, due to the formation of two additional minor bodies. These were more distinctly seen on November 6. Mr. W. R. Brooks, of New York, saw a detached fragment of the comet which afterwards faded out of view. Professor Schmidt observed another and similar fragment which has likewise disappeared.
All these observations indicate disruption due to some disturbing force, acting with different degrees of violence upon different portions of the comet.
Minor disturbances of this kind will, I think, account for the trail of meteoric bodies which Schiaparelli has shown to follow the paths of other comets. A great disturbance might give quite a new orbit to the meteoric fragments.
These considerations suggest another and a curious view of the question of possible cometary collision with the sun, viz., that a comet might be traveling in such an orbit as to make it mathematically due to plunge obliquely beneath the solar surface at its next perihelion; but on its approach to the surface of the sun it might encounter so violent an outrush of solar-prominence matter as to drive it bodily out of its course, and avert the threatened peril to its existence.
THE ORIGIN OF COMETS.
We read in story-books of uncomfortable people who have cherished a guilty secret in their bosoms, that it has “gnawed their vitals,” until at last they have carried it to the grave. I have such a secret that does the gnawing business whenever I write or speak of comets, concerning the origin of which I am guilty of an hypothesis that has hitherto been cherished as aforesaid from the very shame of adding another to an already exaggerated heap of speculations on celestial physics.
It assumes, in the first place, that all the other suns which we see as stars are constituted like our own sun; that they eject great eruptions similar to the prominences above described, and even of vastly greater magnitude, as in the case of the flashing stars that have excited so much wonderment among astronomers, but which I regard simply as suns like ours, subject, like ours, to periodic maximum and minimum activities, but of greater magnitude.