A Brief History of Halley’s Comet

The famous comet named for astronomer Edmond Halley only passes by the Earth roughly once every
76 years, but its appearances have often played a surprising role in historical events.

For much of history, comets were thought to be divine omens, atmospheric anomalies or celestial
wanderers that flashed through the solar system before vanishing into interstellar space. All that started
to change in 1705, when the English astronomer Edmond Halley published his “Synopsis Astronomia
Cometicae.” By using Sir Isaac Newton’s gravitational theories to chart the paths of two dozen comets,
Halley hit on a provocative new theory: three comets seen in 1531, 1607 and 1682 were actually the
same object. Halley argued that the comet orbited the sun and whizzed by the Earth roughly once every
76 years, and he predicted that it would reappear sometime in late 1758 or early 1759. “If it should
return, according to our predictions,” he vowed, “impartial posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that
this was first discovered by an Englishman.”

Halley was eventually proved correct on all counts. Although he died in 1742, his comet appeared in the
sky on Christmas night of 1758, right on schedule. Its discovery was hailed as a triumph of scientific
reasoning and Newtonian physics. “By its appearance at this time, the truth of the Newtonian Theory of
the Solar System is demonstrated to the conviction of the whole world, and the credit of the
astronomers is fully established and raised far above all the wit and sneers of ignorant men,” the British
publication the Gentleman’s Magazine wrote. Shortly thereafter, the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis
de Lacaille named the comet in Halley’s honor.

Scientists now believe that comet 1P/Halley, as it is formally known, has been zipping through the solar
system for as many as 200,000 years. Edmond Halley only identified a handful of occurrences of his
comet, but other scholars have plotted its earlier appearances and uncovered historical references
dating back to the ancient world. In a 2010 paper in the Journal of Cosmology, researchers Daniel W.
Graham and Eric Hintz suggested that one of the earliest known sightings of Halley’s comet may have
occurred around 466 B.C. in the skies over Greece. Ancient accounts of the incident mostly center on a
“wagon-sized” meteorite that landed in the Hellespont, but they note that the strike was accompanied
by a “huge fiery body” that was visible in the sky for 75 days. According to Graham and Hintz, the
timetable matches up almost perfectly with Halley’s comet’s projected appearance in the fifth century
B.C.
While it’s possible that the comet the Greeks saw was Halley’s, more reliable accounts of its flybys didn’t
appear for another few centuries. One of the most famous references is found in China in the Han
Dynasty’s “Records of the Grand Historian,” which describes a “broom star” that appeared in the sky in
240 B.C. Other early sightings came from the Babylonians, who recorded the comet’s 164 B.C. and 87
B.C. transits on clay tablets; and from the Romans, who made reference to it in 12 B.C.

Halley’s comet inspired both fascination and horror in its early observers. The celestial visitor was often
considered a bad omen, and it was linked to everything from the death of kings to natural disasters. The
historian Flavius Josephus described the comet of 66 A.D. as a “star resembling a sword” and considered
it a portent of the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. Several centuries later, the comet of 451
was thought to signal Attila the Hun’s defeat at the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains. In 837, meanwhile,
the Holy Roman Emperor Louis the Pious feared the comet was a signal of his downfall and tried to ward
off its influence with fasting, prayer and alms for the poor.

By far the most famous appearance of Halley’s comet occurred in 1066, when it coincided with the
Norman Conquest. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, in the months before William the Conqueror
set sail for England, “a portent such as men had never seen before was seen in the heavens.”
Contemporary observers considered the “long-haired star” a bad omen for the English King Harold II,
and the prophecy was later fulfilled when William defeated and killed him at the Battle of Hastings.
Halley’s comet was later included in a section of the famed Bayeux Tapestry, which depicts King Harold
and a crowd of fearful Englishmen watching it streak through the sky.

The strange effects of Halley’s comet only continued over the next several centuries. Its 1222
appearance is sometimes credited with inspiring Genghis Khan to dispatch his Mongols on an invasion of
Europe, and its 1456 return famously overlapped with the Ottoman Empire’s invasion of the Balkans.
The comet may have also crept into works of art. After viewing it in 1301, the Italian artist Giotto is said
to have depicted Halley’s comet as the star of Bethlehem in his painting “Adoration of the Magi.”

People began watching the comet with a more scientific eye in the 16th and 17th centuries, but it was
still causing anxiety as recently as 1910. As the comet neared the Earth that year, the New York Times
wrote that a French astronomer named Camille Flammarion had warned that poisonous cyanogen gas in
its tail might “impregnate the atmosphere and snuff out all life on the planet.” Other scientists dismissed
the claim as nonsense, but the prediction still sparked a minor panic. Before the comet passed by
without incident that spring, many people sealed up their homes to keep out the fumes, stocked up on
gas masks, and went to churches to pray for salvation. The more gullible among them even bought
“anti-comet pills” from street vendors.
Halley’s most recent return in 1986 marked the first time that scientists were able to study it with
sophisticated technology. High-powered telescopes were trained on the comet from Earth, and five
unmanned space probes dubbed the “Halley Armada” conducted flybys as it made its transit. One of
them, the European Space Agency’s “Giotto,” even inched within 370 miles of the comet’s nucleus. The
high-quality images returned by the probes were the first of their kind and provided fascinating insight
into Halley, including proving once and for all that its core is a solid mass primarily composed of dust and
ice. So far, no space agency has announced plans for another mission in the future, but there’s still
plenty of time: the famed comet is not scheduled to make its next visit to the inner solar system until
July 2061.