Lecture 44: Comets

Comets are occasional visitors from the icy reaches of the outer Solar

System. This lecture discusses the orbits, structure, and properties of

comets, and introduces the "dirty snowball" model of a comet nucleus.

The end of class was a demo where I created a model of a comet nucleus

from common household and office materials. Imagine a twisted

combination of Alton Brown and Emeril Lagasse with a PhD in Astrophysics

and you get the idea. We were not able to arrange for a videographer to

come, but we did get some stills before the batteries died on the

digital camera. The pictures are on the lecture webpage. The lecture

is slightly abbreviated because we did the student evaluation of

instruction surveys before class started. Recorded 2006 Nov 29 in 100

Stillman Hall on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University.