How Did Maria Mitchell Contribute To Science

Jonathan Hanser
26 September 2017
Mrs. Rowe
Challenge B
Maria Mitchell Maria Mitchell was one of the first professional female astronomers. She lived a long and very productive life. She also made many discoveries. And her research on comets was incredibly helpful to the scientific population. Maria Mitchell was born on August 1, 1818, one of nine children in Nantucket Massachusetts, and was distantly related to the great journalist and inventor, Benjamin Franklin. She was raised in a Quaker household, which greatly helped her love of astronomy, because Quakers regarded women as equals to men. Her father sparked her attraction to the stars when he let her look through his telescope and help him predict the annular solar eclipse. Many years

Because she made many discoveries in the field of astronomy. Her first and most recognized discovery was a previously unrecognized comet, after she had submitted it to the general public it was named Miss Mitchell’s Comet after herself. Although the comet’s formal title was C/1847 T1. The size of the comet is unknown, but it is known as a non-periodical comet, with an orbit span of over 200 earth years. As was said previously she studied sunspots, solar eclipses, comets, along with stars, Saturn, Jupiter, and documented the very rare occurrence of the planet Venus traversing the Sun, this event happening on average every fifty years and six months. Her most famous quote was: “We especially need imagination in science, it is not all mathematics and logic, but it is somewhat beauty and

Comets are sometimes jokingly called “dirty snowballs”, but in light of current information they are more like snowy dirtballs. Comets are composed of dust, ice, carbon dioxide, ammonia, methane, and other materials. Periodical comets (comets that have a 200 year or less orbit span) are thought to have originated in a place called the Kuiper Belt, beyond even the orbit of Pluto. Non-periodical comets (comets with an over 200-year orbit span) are theorized to come from a mysterious place called the Oort Cloud, and some other comets called Sun Grazers are comets that either pass close by the sun or even collide with it, usually causing the comet to burn, evaporate, or even explode. One semi-famous comet, Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into the planet Jupiter in 1994 causing twenty-one visible explosions, the most massive of which made a dark spot on the planet approximately the size of Earth, and generating roughly the force of twelve quadrillion pounds of TNT. In 2005 a NASA spacecraft blew up the comet Tempel 1 for the purpose of generally finding what comets are made of. The tail of a comet (scientifically known as the coma) is a trail of evaporating gasses and minerals formed by being so close to the sun and therefore affected by its radiation, the second, almost invisible tail is made up of charged particles and ions, the two tails together form an arrow that always points to