As alerted to us by LAS website user Brian on our Forums, this week’s episode of the Radio 4 “In Our Time” programme, hosted by Melvyn Bragg, covers the subject of comets.
You can listen in your browser or save the file to your computer for listening to on an MP3 player/transferring to iPod etc.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01pw38n
(You can also get the episode and previous ones by clicking here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/iot)
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss comets, the ‘dirty snowballs’ of the Solar System.
In the early 18th century the Astronomer Royal Sir Edmond Halley compiled a list of appearances of comets, bright objects like stars with long tails which are occasionally visible in the night sky. He concluded that many of these apparitions were in fact the same comet, which returns to our skies around every 75 years, and whose reappearance he correctly predicted. Halley’s Comet is today the best known example of a comet, a body of ice and dust which orbits the Sun. Since they contain materials from the time when the Solar System was formed, comets are regarded by scientists as frozen time capsules, with the potential to reveal important information about the early history of our planet and others.
With:
Monica Grady
Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open UniversityPaul Murdin
Senior Fellow at the Institute of Astronomy at the University of CambridgeDon Pollacco
Professor of Astronomy at the University of WarwickProducer: Thomas Morris