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Comets By: Christian Moreno, Kamryn Johnson, Emily McDonald
The word “comet” now used in all European languages , comes from the Greek word kometes meaning ‘the hairy one, but the earliest extant records of cometary observations date from around -1000 in China and probably from about the same time in Chaldea (around present-day Iraq). Ideas about the true nature of comets are available from the time of the rise of Hellenistic natural philosophy at about -550 when the Pythagoreans considered comets to be a kind of (wandering) planets that were seen rather infrequently and mostly near the horizon in the morning or evening sky. Aristotle in his Meteorology (ca. -330) relegated comets to the lowest, `sub lunar' sphere in his system of spherical shells and described them as `dry and warm exhalations' in the upper atmosphere. HistoryOf comets
Sources http://www.eso.org/public/events/astro-evt/DeepImpact/Background/comet-history-1.html