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关于彗星- -

                                      

彗星的定义：

A celestial body, observed only in that part of its orbit that is relatively close to the sun, having a head consisting of a solid nucleus surrounded by a nebulous coma up to 2.4 million kilometers (1.5 million miles) in diameter and an elongated, curved vapor tail arising from the coma when sufficiently close to the sun. Comets are thought to consist chiefly of ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, and water.
 彗星一种天体，仅能在它比较接近于太阳的那一部分轨道才能看到，有一个包括固体核、由直径达到两千四百万公里（一千五百万英里）的星云状的彗发围绕的头部 ，当足够接近太阳时一个拉长的曲线气尾从彗发升起。人们认为彗星主要有氨、甲烷、二氧化碳和水构成

词源：

Comets have been feared throughout much of human history, and even in our own time their goings and comings receive great attention. Perhaps a comet might seem less awesome if we realized that our name for it is based on a figurative resemblance between it and human beings. This figurative name is recorded first in the works of Aristotle, in which he uses  kom¶, the Greek word for “hair of the head,” to mean “luminous tail of a comet.” Aristotle then uses the derived word  kom¶t¶s, “wearing long hair,” as a noun meaning “comet.” The Greek word was adopted into Latin as  com¶t¶s, which was refashioned in Late Latin and given the form  com¶ta, furnishing Old English with  com¶ta,  the earliest English ancestor of our word  comet.
在大多数人类历史期间，人们害怕彗星，甚至在我们自己的时代彗星的到来与离去仍受到很大注意。如果我们认识到我们对它的名字是基于它和人在外形上的相似性，也许彗星看起来就不太可怕了。比喻的名字首先记录在亚里士多德的著作中，他使用的 kome是希腊语中意为“头发”的词，表示“彗星明亮的尾巴。然后亚里士多德使用导出的单词 kometes“戴长发”，作为名词意义的“comet”。 希腊单词被采用到拉丁语为 cometes， 它再形成晚期拉丁语，给定形式为 cometa，以 cometa的形式出现于老式英语，这就是我们单词 comet的最早英语原形

- 作者： 翰唐 访问统计：　2005年08月4日, 星期四 03:13 加入博采