There was an old painting in my grandparents' attic. Neither beautiful nor ugly, it simply depicted an empty room with no figures, an old living room with an armchair, library, and fireplace ... [+]
The last apparition of Halley's Comet was in 1986, approaching Earth as close as 0.4 astronomical units. Halley takes a long journey to visit us. The comet follows an elliptical orbit that reaches past Pluto before returning to the inner solar system. Its next flyby will be 76 years later, in 2061. During its orbit, Halley leaves fragments of itself in its trail—stray rocks, dust, and sometimes ice, blown away by the solar winds, floating in clumps across space. Occasionally, the Earth passes through this debris, causing it to rocket toward the planet at high speeds, burning brightly as it di