What is #InternationalCometDay?

It's an initiative created by three Twtter users @IamComet67P, @the_egghunter and @plutosgems in order to make the 1st of July the international day of comets.

#InternationalCometDay was created on Twitter and exists on Twitter, but our hope is that this initiative shall spread further and that the 1st of July will eventually become an official comet day.


Why do we want an International Comet Day?

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta Mission, which landed a probe on a comet’s surface (Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko) for the first time, has captured the world’s imagination. It is an outstanding human and scientific achievement, and will reveal more about the secrets of comets as more experiments are undertaken.

We want to celebrate this achievement, and help educate and entertain people around the world, by establishing a date when the comet is king for a day.


The Building Blocks of Life

Not only are comets beautiful sights in the sky, but they might well be the reason why there’s life on Earth.

Research have shown that comets contain certain chemicals that contain the basic ingredients of life and are thus essential when it comes to the forming of living organisms. These are ordinary chemicals like ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide but the secret is that they contain the ingredients to amino acids. Without amino acids, protein cannot be formed.

Comets are, just like the planets, dwarf planets and asteroids, left overs from the birth of our Sun. The young Solar System was quite a violent place. There were far more asteroids and comets moving through the Solar System, sometimes colliding with planets, and these collisions might just as well be what brought the building blocks of life to Earth.


How does a comet bring life?

A comet crashes, melts and release ammonia, methanol and carbon dioxide

Understanding how life began is a tricky business, but lab experiments have shown that all that is needed in order to create the above mentioned mundane chemicals into amino acids is a shockwave, and when a large object collides with another large object, that’s exactly what is produced. That's why we believe that comets have had a big impact on the forming of life on Earth.

As if this wasn't enough, we still have fair reasons to believe that comets might have helped to form our oceans. Not only are comets beautiful sights in the sky but they might as well be the very reason why you're reading this.


Why the 1st of July?

On the 1st of July in 1770, humanity had its closest known encounter with possible extinction. French astronomer Charles Messier had two weeks prior to that discovered a faint comet that would later become known as Lexell's Comet.

This comet passed Earth on a distance of under 2.4 million kilometeres (1.5 million miles. This equals to six times the distance to the Moon) from Earth. Lexell's Comet is about 5 kilometeres (3 miles) in diameter and should it have collided with Earth, a global disaster would have been inevitable (read a full article about it here).

Thus we chose this particular day as a reminder of how vulnerable we really are on our pale blue dot.


What do we want you to do?

If you support this idea, you may join our comet team by logging in or registering on Twitter and use the hashtags #TeamComet and #InternationalCometDay in order to help us reach out to more people.
Your tweets may be news about comets, facts about comets, thoughts about comets or just a showing of appreciation concerning this initiative.

If you have any questions about this site, send an e-mail to egghunter@gmail.com.