Comets and Global Armageddon! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Shoemaker-Levy 9

Shoemaker-Levy 9's king hits on Jupiter re-wrote planetary development theory. It showed how vulnerable the Earth is to massive impact and gave credence to Eugene Shoemaker's controversial identification of dozens of massive impact craters on the earth.

Revolutionary comet theorist Shoemaker just missed being the first scientist on the moon during the Apollo program, after being disqualified due to Addison's Disease (the same adrenal disorder suffered by John F. Kennedy).

The largest Shoemaker-Levy impact was roughly the size of the Earth's radius and hit with the force of 6,000,000 megatons of TNT. That's about the energy equivalent of a 2,300,000,000,000,000 burner barbecue, set to medium.

Answer: Halley's

Halley's Comet has been the wellspring for much scientific and literary creativity. Halley is also recognised as the first scientifically identified periodic comet with a 76 year orbit, and is a candidate for the Star of Bethlehem.

Mark Twain was born in the year of Halley's Comet in 1835 and is quoted as saying:

"I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835.
It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it.
It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet.
The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks;
they came in together, they must go out together."

The unfortunate King Harold (of the arrow in the eye fame) is not quoted but probably said something like, "Look out for the sparrow? That's not a sparrow, that's a seagull...".

Answer: Hayakutake and Hale-Bopp

Hale-Bopp's visit triggered the mass suicide of the Heaven's Gate cult, whereby 39 black-clad members believed that the comet was a divine portent. Their souls were apparently rescued by the spaceship following the comet. A terminal case of "stuporstition", led by maniacal music teacher Marshall Applewhite, who was evidently a few apples short of a full pie.

Hayakutake is a long period comet, believed to return next in 100,000 years time. That's about 700,000 in dog years.

Answer: Tunguska, Siberia

The Tunguska event had an impact radius of over 830 square miles - over twice the size of metropolitan New York, with an estimated energy of 10-15 megatons.

The massive impact produced an air-pressure surge that was recorded in Great Britain.

Fortunately for humanity, but rather annoying in a venison barbecue kind of way for Siberian reindeer, it hit a sparsely populated area. So remote was the impact area, that it was not scientifically investigated until 1921.

Answer: McNaught

In the Southern Hemisphere this made a spectacular sight in the low horizon during January and February of 2007, with a huge tail spanning 35 degrees - more than a hand span at arm's length.

Alas, with its orbit being hyperbolic, Comet McNaught is not expected to return to our skies for absolute squillions and gazillions of years. Or maybe that's just hyperbole.

Answer: Encke

Encke is believed to be responsible for the Taurid meteor shower, known as the 'Halloween Fireballs'.

There is also debate as to whether a chunk of Encke is the source of a possible impact in the Fertile Crescent around 1200BCE, causing a period of rapid decline called the Bronze Age Collapse, when the Hittite, Egyptian and Mycenaean cultures abruptly declined into a dark age.

The 2007 discovery of a crater dating from this time near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates gives credence to this hypothesis, and may indicate the origins of the 'Seven Judges of Hell' who 'smashed the land like a cup' in the ancient Gilgamesh epic.

Or it may not.

Answer: Giotto

In 1986, Giotto was the first probe to take photos of a cometary nucleus, and revealed that the peanut shaped nucleus of Halley contained carbon compounds and was blacker than soot.

After surviving a dust-blasting from Halley, the resilient Giotto probe was put into hibernation, and reactivated in 1992 to analyse the cosmically older comet Grigg-Skellerup.

The Giotto probe was so-named because it is believed that Halley's comet was the inspiration for the influential 14th century Italian painter Giotto de Bodone's 1301 depiction of the Star of Bethlehem.

Prociutto, Garibaldi and Risotto have nothing whatsoever to do with comets, but are all delicious in a cosmic-Italianate way.

Answer: Deep Impact

Part of the probe, not surprisingly known as the Deep Impact Impactor, smashed into the comet, causing a 200 metre diameter crater. The ejecta from this explosion revealed a composition that includes carbonates, silicates, metal sulphides (a bit like fool's gold), and jellybeans. Well, maybe not jellybeans.

'Deep Impact' was also a scientifically plausible 1998 film about an 'Extinction Level Event' cometary impact, similar to the event that possibly caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. This film was released at the same time as the Bruce Willis cosmically comic asteroid disaster film 'Armageddon'.

A scientific tour-de-farce, or a nasty case of asteroids, Armageddon is used in NASA's management training program for its legendary ignorance of the laws of physics. Armageddon allegedly contains 168 scientifically impossible events in 150 minutes. It also made $US 1/2 a billion at the box office, which is enough to pay about a 1/2 a billion astronomers annual wages.

Answer: Biela's Comet

One controversial theory is that fragments of Biela's Comet are responsible for the three great fires that mysteriously broke out in America on the same day - October 8, 1871. It is speculated that this triggered the great Chicago Fire, Port Huron Fire in Michigan, and Peshtigo Fire in Wisconsin.

The Peshtigo fire in particular was the deadliest fire in American history, when a huge firestorm burnt an area approximately the size of Rhode Island, and claimed between 1,200 and 2,500 lives.

The 1965 sun-grazing comet Ikeya-Seki was reputedly the brightest comet of the past 1,000 years, with a magnitude of -10, or nearly as bright as the full moon. It is thought to be a remnant of an even brighter earlier comet, one which may have been observed by Aristotle in 371BCE, which subsequently broke up and spawned a host of great comets throughout history.

Answer: False

Many of the great comets of the past 50 years have been discovered by amateurs with modest kit. The Great Comet Hayakutake of 1996 was discovered by the amateur astronomer Yuji Hyakutake with a pair of binoculars.

Similarly Hale-Bopp co-discoverer Thomas Bopp found his 1997 comet whilst using a borrowed telescope.

Comet discoverers also get naming rights, so get out there and hustle the night skies for naming rights of the next great comet, Comet Terry-Ford-Xzibit-Blackadder IV. Who knows, you might even save humanity, or at least stop an Armageddon sequel.