PHYSICS OF COMETS (3RD EDITION)

by Swamy K S Krishna

This revised edition places a unique emphasis on all the new results from ground-based, satellites and space missions -- detection of molecule H2 and prompt emission lines of OH for the first time; discovery of X-rays in comets; observed diversity in chemical composition among comets; the puzzle of the constancy of spin temperature; the well-established mineralogy of cometary dust; extensive theoretical modeling carried out for understanding the observed effects; the similarity in the mineralogy of dust in circumstellar shell of stars, comets, meteorites, asteroids and IDPs, thus indicating the generic relationship between them.

460 pages, Hardcover

First published May 3, 1997

Reviews

[LS · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! This is just the type of standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants book that I love. Swamy's thirty to forty year career in comets is distilled into one small book densely packed with information. The one drawback is the bad English. There are lots of grammatical and spelling errors which make reading the book a slightly stilted experience.

Beyond that, the author's writing is clear, informative, and succinct. Every sentence contains concepts. Each term is clearly and simply defined. The pros and cons of every theory are considered along with a conclusion as to whether the data confirms the theory or not. This book is the comet bible; it analyzes comets from every perspective, optical, chemical, physical dynamics, plasma interactions. It also analyzes each component of a comet: the comma, nucleus, dust tail, etc.

I was originally interested in this book because I wanted to know if a tail could exist separately from the head of the comet. My searches on Google yielded no answer. So I started reading this book, after I slogged through the preliminaries, I discovered that a comet's tail is a plasma. If the plasma from the solar wind or the interplanetary plasma interacts with it just so, the tail will disconnect and persist for a while before dissipating. Of course the nucleus of the comet will continue the process which produces the dust tail, so a new one will be generated.

By the end of the book the subject becomes really fascinating as the discussion extends to cosmology and comets' connections with asteroids and meteorites. I also appreciate how the author did not waste time on digressions into the state of science or scientific discovery. He stuck to the subject of comets. His excitement about them was so palpable throughout the book that I reckon he would be thrilled to study comets for another forty years if he could.