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The comet the world knows as Halley’s Comet may owe its “first to spot the pattern” credit to someone far earlier than Edmond Halley: an 11th-century English monk. New interdisciplinary research argues that the monk Eilmer (also known as Aethelmaer) of Malmesbury linked two appearances of the same comet - centuries before Halley calculated its return. If the claim holds, it reframes a famous scientific milestone as something medieval thinkers were already inching toward. In the Leiden University account, astronomer Simon Portegies Zwart and British Museum scientist Michael Lewis point to a passage preserved by the 12th-century chronicler William of Malmesbury, suggesting Eilmer recognized the comet he saw in 1066 as the same one he had witnessed decades earlier, in