Lecture 44: Comets
Comets are occasional visitors from the icy reaches of the outer Solar\nSystem. This lecture discusses the orbits, structure, and properties of\ncomets, and introduces the "dirty snowball" model of a comet nucleus.\nThe end of class was a demo where I created a model of a comet nucleus\nfrom common household and office materials. Imagine a twisted\ncombination of Alton Brown and Emeril Lagasse with a PhD in Astrophysics\nand you get the idea. We were not able to arrange for a videographer to\ncome, but we did get some stills before the batteries died on the\ndigital camera. The pictures are on the lecture webpage. The lecture\nis slightly abbreviated because we did the student evaluation of\ninstruction surveys before class started. Recorded 2006 Nov 29 in 100\nStillman Hall on the Columbus campus of The Ohio State University.