Harrisburg telegraph. [volume] (Harrisburg, Pa.) 1879-1948, 1914-04-30
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Wonders Of the
Heavens
BY Garrett P. Serviss
ar4 H. EDn 4 h q

BY Garrett P. Serviss
large part of the fear that great
an instructive dread of their tremendous
( powers for evil. They look like besoms
of destruction. and those who know
nothing about astronomy accept them
at their apparent face value.
And in truth. If they could come
they s' Would is do an ssara enormoEs amount inc Of
damage. and some of them might be
capable of putting the earth temper,
arily out of commission as an inhabited
The terror that was aroused in many
quarters by Halley's Comet In 1919, has
been recalled by the appearance of sey-
eral new comets within few monthc
past, so that it is worth while to con-
slider, what an evilly disposed comet
What 1t Might Do.
There are two ways in which comet
could cause damage to the earth, :,
$4,000 times the velocity of an express
train; and second, by injecting the at
osphere with the or stins
Let us consider the first case of
comet shock.
Two things have to be taken into fbo
weight of the colliding comet. consid-
cred as, a gigantic projectile. shot
Comets are very deceptive in regard
to weight or mass. They are enor-
mously large, but relatively. very light.
that appeared in 1851. which first graz
ed the. sun and then swept the earth
with its tail. You perceive how in
significant our globe looks in its pres
once. But size is not everything, for
small as the earth is compared with
that great comet, it outweighed it mil
Halley's comet also occupied vastly
more space than the earth, but care
full estimate has shown that 1T prob
100000 tons. which is much less than
the weight of the material eXcavated
to make the Panama Canal
II might be thought, then, that the
earth is in no more danger from such
comet than a battleship is from a
boys beanshooter. But now the veloc-
of comet at the earths distance from
per second
A mass of thirty million tons shoot
ing through space at velocity of
twenty-siX miles per second would de-
Velop, in round numbers, about twenty
auintillion foot-pounds of energy, equi-
valent to the development in one second
of thirty-siX thousand million horse
power!
Where the comet struck everything
rock, soil, vegetation-would be melted
Vitriied, and even vaporized, in an in
stant. for all this tremendous energy
would be turned into heat through the
sudden and complete arrest of the swift
motion of the comet. The six hundred
quintillions of absolute units of en-
ergy" developed by the stopping of the
comet would furnish enough heat to
liquefy more than a million tons of
solid iron,
The result would be very big and
a very deep hole in the earth Thou
sands of square miles would be more
or less directly affected by the terrific
impact, for the shock would be greater
than that of the mightiest earthquake,
and perhaps buildings would tumble in
their fringes of rock in all parts of
the globe, while the sea would hurl
itself in whelming tidal waves upon
every coast and drown all the low
lying islands.
A Great Heat
The atmospheric disturbance would
also be enormous. The sudden develo--
ment of great heat at the point of col
lision would unbalance the air currents,
and destructive and capricious winds
would blow to and fro over the earth.
consider the effects of a collision be-
tween the earth and the tail of comet.
This is something that has actually oc-
Cured two or three times within a CEN
tury. AS already said, the comet of
1861, shown in the picture, enveloped
the earth with the spreading end of its
tail for q few hours, and in 1910 Hal
ley's comet brushed its tail over the
earth but apparently the electric re-
pulsion developed prevented the gases
of the tail from entering the atmos-
phere. 1t is possible that in every case
this would occur, so that electricity
may be our effective guardian against
deleteriouS substances that might 9TH
erwise be introduced into the atmos-
phere from the switching tails of close
passing comets.