Abstract
THE SPECTRUM OF KIESS'S COMET.—With spectrographs attached to the equatorial of the Juvisy Observatory, MM. de la Baume Pluvinel and Baldet secured photographs of the spectrum of comet 1911b, which they discuss in a paper published in No. 8 of the Comptes rendus (August 21). On their best photograph, the two bright bands at λ 4735 and λ 3882 are accompanied by many fainter bands, which present one or two noteworthy features. Three feeble condensations at λλ 3914, 4005, and 4026 are apparently only in the tail; they probably correspond with the λ 3914 of the kathode spectrum of nitrogen and with the doublet (λ 4003 and λ 4023) given by Fowler. While agreeing with the majority of cometary spectra, that of comet 1911b is different in many respects from those of several recent comets. For instance, the great comet 1910a showed a most intense continuous spectrum, of which there is very little in the radiations from the Kiess comet. Again, in Morehouse's comet the doublets traced by Fowler were common to the nucleus and the tail; here they are peculiar to the tail. To explain this, the authors suggest that in the former case the decomposition of the cyanogen was very active, and so one got the products of the decomposition surrounding the nucleus; but in the case of comet 1911b the activity was not so great, and the cyanogen was not sufficiently decomposed until it had been repelled from the nucleus into the tail.
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Our Astronomical Column . Nature 87, 337–338 (1911). https://doi.org/10.1038/087337a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/087337a0