Zionsville Times editor wrote of comet visible locally in 1882

By Joan Lyons/Times Sentinel columnist

Today’s column may appear to be self-serving to some who see me only as an employee of the local newspaper for the past thirty years. (Actually I’m presently a contract writer who submits a weekly column.) But, since my pathway has focused almost exclusively on local history for most of those years, I’m one of the few “newcomers” who has gained real perspective on the reasons Zionsville is such a great place to live.

As I search for material for my column, I’m constantly amazed to find more and more evidence of the enrichment of a community that has consistently had the coverage provided by a quality newspaper for 149 years. Few communities have that advantage.

The town where I grew up was, in many ways, more like a suburb of the large city it bordered. Perhaps it was felt unnecessary to have a newspaper of its own since the big city had two daily papers to choose from.

The first local coverage I remember came from an enterprising church minister who coupled church news with a few items from outside his church community and distributed the Flyer weekly to local residents.

We had no local museum or library and, so far as I know, no place where a record was kept of local accomplishments, failures, experiments, or anything else of historical usefulness.

Zionsville, in contrast, has the Patrick Henry Sullivan Museum, a part of the SullivanMunce Cultural Center, where a reader-copier is available to make use of the microfilm of most of those 7,748 editions of our local paper.

Not only did, and does, The Zionsville Times and its successor the Zionsville Times Sentinel carry local news and vital news from the county seat, but it always has included columns that keep us informed and connected to life improving innovations on a wide range of subjects.

An example of the latter comes from Editor Cal. Gault in the October 19, 1882, edition of The Times. His subject is “The Comet.” We’ve edited only to break the lengthy column into paragraphs.

“This magnificent object, visible in the eastern sky for more than an hour before sunrise, has excited great interest, and well it may, for a comet so grand as this does not visit us more than twice or thrice in a century. There is, judging from the accounts of observations in the newspapers, but little certainty known about it.

“One account says it passed the nearest point of its orbit to the sun on a certain day and hour, going through the sun’s atmosphere without being burned up. That atmosphere, however, is supposed to have retarded its speed, so that it will come back at a less interval next time than it did last, and probably, fall into the sun.

“A paper read by Mr. Huggins before the Royal Institution of London, and published recently in the Nineteenth Century, shows how little is yet ‘positively known about comets. If we could see,’ says Mr. Huggins, ‘a great comet during its distant wandering when it has put off the gala trappings of perihelion excitement it would appear a very sober object and consist of little more than the nucleus alone.’

“The nucleus is the bright speck which can be seen, by aid of the telescope, in the head of a comet, which alone has any claim to solidity or appreciable weight, and which being subject to the love of gravity, determines its course, and indeed is really the comet.

“The coma, or the hair of the comet, and the tail appear as a luminous fog, and are only an emanation from the nucleus, drawn forth by the action of the sun, so far as can be judged. Although the comet, as seen by the naked eye, appears to be a body of fixed shape, yet when seen through the telescope it is discovered to be going through numberless and ceaseless changes, which assume the general form which we see.

“Great streams appear to be driven forth by the sun from the nucleus, which, after traveling a certain distance sunward stop, gather into halos or envelopes, which then burst, and their contents, driven by some apparently sun-given repulsive force, which perplexes scientists, stream back beyond the nucleus, forming a tail.

“The nuclei of large comets are not, the writer of the article points out, airy nothings, but ‘may be a few hundred miles in diameter,’ and ‘consist of solid matter,’ so that, though some are so small that they do not perturb the smallest satellites when they come in contact with them, yet if one of those larger ones were to strike the earth it would produce destruction.

“The spectrum shows that these comets shine partly by light of their own and partly by reflected light, and ‘that one part of the cometary’s stuff is in the condition of gas, and that this gas in a large majority of comets contains carbon, hydrogen and nitrogen, and possibly also oxygen in the form of hydrocarbon cyanogens, and possibly oxygen compounds of carbon.’

“The discovery of the fact that the meteors which we see as shooting stars are really detached wanderers from swarms of meteors which have orbits round the sun, and that the path of these meteors is identical with that of certain comets, proves a physical connection and oneness of origin ‘if not identity of nature of comets and of meteor swarms.’

“The examinations of the meteorites which are picked up confirm in a large degree the disclosures of the spectrum. Mr. Huggins says, ‘There seems to be a rapidly growing feeling among physicists that both the self light of comets and the phenomenon of their tails belong to the order of electrical phenomena.’”

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