There is a green comet currently in our night skies. Today we seek out comets with our binoculars and telescopes. But even a few hundred years ago, humans used to associate bad-luck and bad omen at the sight of the comets. Shakespeare wrote about it in his play, Julius Caesar. Comets were mentioned in Akbarnama, the biography of the great Mughal Emperor, Akbar. Mirza Ghalib saw a comet soon before the official British takeover of India in 1858, and, understandably, saw it as a sign of misfortune. But the comet of 1577 also helped overthrow the cosmology of Aristotle, and brought it closer to the shift from an Earth-centric universe to a Sun-centered Solar system. Please join astrophysicist Salman Hameed in exploring not only the history of comets, but also the science behind the color of the green comet, C/2022 E3 (ZTF), in this episode.

For the video of this podcast: https://youtu.be/eBge-k5cUZY