Halley's comet bears the name of the astronomer who famously first described its movements through space, but he wasn't the first to discover its periodic orbit past Earth, new research suggests.
Halley's comet is named for British astronomer Edmond Halley, who pieced the space rock's orbit together in 1705 through a combination of his own observations and historical records from other observers. But recent research suggests that Halley was not the first to discover his eponymous comet's roughly 75-year cycle. Instead, the English monk Eilmer (also known as Aethelmaer) of Malmesbury may have connected two observations of the comet more than 600 years earlier.
