1. Gotta love those long-hairs. We’re talking comets, of course. The word derives from kometes, ancient Greek for “a head with long hair.”
2. While the Greeks began using the term about 2,500 years ago, astronomers in both China and Mesopotamia logged appearances of the long-tailed objects at least 500 years earlier.
3. We don’t know when humans first observed comets, but in 2018, two researchers claimed that some of France’s famous Lascaux cave art — created about 17,000 years ago — depicted cometary activity.
