ABOUT COMETS.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume 5, Issue 1335, 24 March 1883, Page 2

ABOUT COMETS.

. According to Mr Schmidt, an Athens observer, the great comeUf 1882 gaye birth to.a daughter. One morning (says the London correspondont of the Mel-' bourne Telegraph] iy little comet was observed running alongside the big onethe mother. TheV, ; Uttle' stranger had' been produced by segmentation; The two stars had the .appearance of marching together, but the'mother had changed m form; thenucleus from being spherical had become, elongated. This was not the first .occasion oil which our world: life witnessed the birth of a star.' The Biela comet, in 1846, split in two, IHscqveredin 1826%-Biela, it returned in'six y-jars and nine months, as was accurated predicted, On the 13th January, 1842, it opened in twoJ lengthways; and'that evening the twins .revelled in beauty side by side, two complete' comets, with independent heads and tails, A few days later they separated, and by tho 10th February •theywere already 180,000 m il es asunder. One. lost its tail rapidly and also its brilliancy; by March both' were invisible. In 1852, after \ a punctual .revolution of six yearsand nine months, they reappeared, but distant 1,800,000 miles from each other. Since, nothing has beeu heard of cither. However, it is suspected that the shower of falling stars that sojsingulady marked- 1 the year 1872 were' the debris of the Biela comet, According to Schiorparelli, a swarm of.shooting stars follow in space orbits identical with those of cornets, and are'simply comets-reduced to morels by disintegration,