Synonyms:
comet
Meaning: (astronomy) a relatively small extraterrestrial body consisting of a frozen mass that travels around the sun in a highly elliptical orbit
Usage examples
Or was it due to a collision with some comet?
The Comet Asters of later years are a much-improved type of flower, with a looser shape and a certain degree of approach to grace and beauty.
He watched it anxiously for successive evenings, and by the 24th of January he was quite sure he had got hold of some moving body, not a star: probably, he thought, a comet.
If a wrong entry were discovered, it might of course have been due to some clerical error, though that is hardly probable considering the care taken over these things, or it might have been some tailless comet or other, or it might have been the newly found planet.
Others surmised the presence of some foreign and unknown body, some comet, or some still more distant planet perhaps, whose gravitative attraction for Uranus was the cause of the whole difficulty--some perturbations, in fact, which had not been taken into account because of our ignorance of the existence of the body which caused them.