Stardust - 1. the Comet

the Comet

The comet was ancient and big as a mountain. It drifted in the Milky Way in the deep cold black of interstellar space for eons. It was a timeless wanderer, a drifting piece of debris. It was the last mute witness of a catastrophe that had shattered the solar system of its birth. Deep within its armor of layers of frozen gases, the last progeny of that shattered world slept at near absolute zero.

Whether you might call it a comet or an asteroid would be a matter of opinion. Surely it had solid mass- the mass that was at its core. It also had a high fraction of dust that had adhered itself to its surface in the long dark of interstellar space. However the vast majority of the body was indeed ice.

It was layered like a hailstone. As it drifted through the countless millennia, when it encountered gas or dust, it would stick to the comets near absolute zero surface. Over the eons, it had grown from a clump of a few dozen rocks and some soil of its ancient homeworld to a mass the size of Mount Everest.

About the time of the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event on earth, the same gravitational anomaly that dropped the asteroid on the Yucatan which wiped out the dinosaurs, changed the comets vector. It wasn't much of a change but it was just enough to allow it to be captured in the grips of a G class dwarf star and achieve a stable, albeit distant orbit.around that star.

Every few hundred thousand years or so, that orbit aligned at right angles with the weak force of the nearby star Proxima Centauri. In every pass, the comets orbit was degraded. A few short tens of millions of years later there was a rare alignment of the small gas giant that humans would someday name Neptune and Proxima Centauri at its closest approach. The comet lost delta-V at a prodigious rate and once again there was a much more radical change in its orbit zipping down between Uranus and Neptune and then back out into the depth of the Oort cloud.

About the time of the Greek victory at Thermopylae, there was a alignment of Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus that added pitch and delta-V to the comets orbit sending it falling toward the inner solar system.

Shortly after the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC, a blazing comet was seen. It was so brilliant that it was visible in broad daylight and signaled to the Romans the deification of their fallen leader.

To make that soul a star that burns forever

Above the Forum and the gates of Rome

The people called it Caesar's comet and it was one of the brightest reported in antiquity. Much of the comets ice was burned away and once again it retreated into the depths of outer solar system. However the orbit was irreparably changed. It was caught int a dying spiral towards the yellow star at the bottom of the star systems gravity well.

The next time it passed the inner solar system in the year 847 AD, the comet passed without notice while Frankish lords in Brittany were paying the Danegeld to Danish Vikings to spare their lands and the Saracens captured the Byzantine city of Bari in Southern Italy and established a Muslim Emirate.

The next time the comet passed in 1641 the stratovolcano Mount Parker in the Philippines was having a major eruption, in England the Star Chamber is abolished and Charles the 1st flees London. No one saw the much reduced comet through the rich red sunrises and sunsets created by a distant volcano no one had ever heard of.

On its way out of the inner solar system, the comet met with disaster in a close approach to Jupiter. The gravity and tidal forces of the giant planet rended at the comet opening up fissures and causing it to lose even more delta-V halving its orbit.

On its return to the inner solar system in 2019 a close approach to Saturn shattered it. It ceased being a solid whole and became a chunky debris field two hundred kilometers wide and twelve hundred kilometers long.