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Updated: June 22, 2025
The two flying objects, as they came careering down the slope directly toward the Trapper, who was heroically holding himself above the aperture in the box with the porcine volcano in full play under him, presented the dreadful appearance of Biela's comet when, rent by some awful explosion, the one half was on the point of taking its eternal farewell of the other.
There is another called Biela's, which revisits the sun every six years, or a little more; and this busy traveller actually crossed our orbit in 1832, only a month before we passed through the same point in space! Another, which made a grand appearance in the western sky in March 1843, would have involved us in its tail, if we had been only a fortnight earlier at a particular place!
Similar displays were noticed in the years 1830, 1838, and 1847, and the point from which they emanated was shown by Heis at Aix-la-Chapelle to be situated near the bright star Gamma Andromedæ. Now this is precisely the direction in which the orbit of Biela's comet would seem to lie, as it runs down to cut the terrestrial track very near the place of the earth at the above dates.
The physical transformations of comets are among the most wonderful of unexplained phenomena in the heavens. But, for physical astronomers, the greatest interest attaches to the reduction of radius vector of Encke's comet, the splitting of Biela's comet into two comets in 1846, and the somewhat similar behaviour of other comets.
But our interest in cometary orbits has been added to by the discovery that, owing to the causes just cited, a comet, if it does not separate into discrete parts like Biela's, must in time have its parts spread out so as to cover a sensible part of the orbit, and that, when the earth passes through such part of a comet's orbit, a meteor shower is the result.
The precise date of the occurrence was not easily determinable, but Galle thought the chances in favour of November 28. The event anticipated the prediction by twenty-four hours. Scarcely had the sun set in Western Europe on November 27, when it became evident that Biela's comet was shedding over us the pulverised products of its disintegration.
Their paths, although more eccentric, are all contained in planes that nearly correspond with the planes of the planetary orbits, and they travel in these paths in the same general direction with their planetary brethren in every case. The planetoid comets of short period are Encke's, De Vico's, Brorsen's, D'Arrest's, Biela's, and Fage's.
We can scarcely doubt that the fate has overtaken them which Newton assigned as the end of all cometary existence. Diffundi tandem et spargi per coelos universos. Biela's is not the only vanished comet. Brorsen's, discovered at Kiel in 1846, and observed at four subsequent returns, failed unaccountably to become visible in 1890.
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