Comet Morehouse (modern formal designation: C/1908 R1) was a bright, non-periodic

comet A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that, when passing close to the Sun, warms and begins to release gases, a process that is called outgassing. This produces a visible atmosphere or coma, and sometimes also a tail. These phenomena ar ...

discovered by US astronomer Daniel Walter Morehouse and first observed on September 1, 1908. It was unusual in the rapid variations seen in the structure of its tail. At times, the tail seemed to split into up to six separate tails; at others, the tail appeared completely detached from the head of the comet. The tail was further unusual in that it formed while the comet was still 2 AU away from the Sun (where distances of 1.5 AU are more usual), and that there was a high concentration of the CO⁺ ion in its spectrum. As is typical for comets fresh from the

Oort Cloud The Oort cloud (), sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud, first described in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, is a theoretical concept of a cloud of predominantly icy planetesimals proposed to surround the Sun at distances ranging from 2 ...

, its orbital solution is more or less parabolic; if its orbit is in fact closed, it will likely not return for millions of years.

References

External links

*
Photographs of Comet Morehouse from the Lick Observatory Records Digital Archive, UC Santa Cruz Library's Digital Collections
* Non-periodic comets 1908 in science 19080901 {{comet-stub