Great Comet of 1680

1680NotableContested

Gottfried Kirch finds a comet by telescope in November 1680. It grows into a great comet, tests Newton's gravity, and prompts Pierre Bayle to deny that comets are omens.

Longest chain: The Big Bang → First atomic nuclei form → First stars ignite → First galaxies assemble → Milky Way takes shape → The Sun forms → Earth forms → First oceans → First life → Photosynthesis evolves → Great Oxidation Event → Complex cells (eukaryotes) → Multicellular life → First animals → Cambrian Explosion → First vertebrates → Jawed fish → Lobe-finned fish → Fish walk onto land → The amniotic egg → The Great Dying → Dinosaurs appear → End-Triassic extinction → Pangaea breaks apart → Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum → Early primates → First anthropoid primates → Apes split from monkeys → Great apes split from gibbons → Human line splits from chimpanzees → Walking upright → First stone tools → Genus Homo appears → Homo erectus → Control of fire → Habitual fire and cooking → Homo sapiens appears → Complex language → Natufian villages → Oldest known bread → Agriculture begins → Irrigation → Uruk and the first cities → Cylinder seals → Writing (cuneiform) → Egyptian hieroglyphs → The alphabet → Phoenician alphabet → Greek alphabet → Solon's reforms → Athenian democracy → Trial and death of Socrates → Plato's Academy → Aristotle's Lyceum → Alexander's conquests → Death of Alexander and the Hellenistic kingdoms → Seleucid Empire founded → Parthian Empire founded → Sasanian Empire → Birth of Muhammad → Muhammad's first revelations → The Hijra → Conquest of Mecca → Death of Muhammad and the Rashidun caliphate → Arab conquests → Abbasid Caliphate → Battle of Talas → Paper reaches the Islamic world → House of Wisdom → Ibn al-Haytham's Book of Optics → Eyeglasses → Telescope → Great Comet of 1680

The story

On November 14, 1680, the German astronomer Gottfried Kirch discovered a comet through a telescope, the first comet found that way. It grew into a spectacular object with a long tail. It passed extremely close to the Sun in December and then moved out again. John Flamsteed in England proposed that the comets seen before and after perihelion were one body that had turned around the Sun, which Newton at first doubted, but Newton later showed that one orbit could fit both, treating it as a body bound to the Sun by gravity.

Newton used the comet in his Principia (1687) to test his theory. The comet was also a test of belief. Many preachers, such as Increase Mather in New England, treated it as a warning from God, while the French philosopher Pierre Bayle wrote in 1682 that comets are natural objects and that fear of them is superstition. Edmond Halley later used comet records, this one among them, to compute orbits and to predict the return of the comet that bears his name.

Why it mattered

Provided Newton with a test case showing that comets obey the same gravity as planets in the Principia.
Gave a key public argument that comets are natural, not omens, through Pierre Bayle's 1682 essays on the comet.
Contributed data that Halley used when he worked out orbits for 24 comets.

Sources

Great Comet of 1680 COBS Comet Observation Database
Halley, Edmond Encyclopedia.com

Contested history

Consensus: A single comet looped around the Sun in 1680 and 1681 on an orbit shaped by gravity; at the time people argued over whether it was one object and whether it carried a message.

It was one comet obeying the Sun's gravityEstablished

Newton showed one orbit fits both the inbound and outbound sightings, and later studies agree.

Read this view

Great Comet of 1680 COBS Comet Observation Database

It was two comets, one before and one after the SunDebunked

Flamsteed held this view at first, but Newton's orbit calculation made it untenable.

It was a divine warning to humanityUnsupported

Many preachers believed so, and Bayle argued against it; no evidence ever linked comets to events on Earth.

Community notes

Loading notes…

Learn more ranked by votes

BookSara Schechner Genuth

At a glance

When: November 1680 to March 1681
Where: Seen across Europe and the Americas; discovered at Coburg, Germany
Key people: Gottfried Kirch (discoverer)
John Flamsteed (observer)
Isaac Newton (computed its orbit)
Pierre Bayle (wrote against comet omens)

24comets whose orbits Halley later computed

185earlier events it rests on

322later events that depend on it