A hypothetical cross-section of the Solar System. Credit: NASA-JPL/Caltech. Click to enlarge.
Jun 14, 2018
Where do comets come from?
The Nebular Hypothesis proposes that the Solar System was born when a cloud of gases and dust shrank to the point where compression started a nuclear chain reaction, giving birth to the Sun, along with an accretion disc circling its equatorial plane. Consensus astronomers think that the accretion disc was larger than the orbit of Neptune.
They also contend that “eddies and whirlpools” of material that was not subsumed by the newly-minted Sun, slowly attracted larger and larger particles, until, after millions of years, those nebular condensates formed the planets.
The theory was amended in order to explain so-called “long period” comets that seem to appear out of nowhere and then return to deep space. A “holding area” called, the “Oort Cloud”, a nimbus of fragments left over from those early days of the Solar System, is conventionally thought to be a spherical region enclosing the Sun at a maximum radius of about 5 trillion kilometers. The Cloud is said to contain billions of objects, from planetary masses down to the size of medium asteroids. Due to its distance from the Sun, the Oort Cloud is thought to be incredibly cold; a deep-freeze approaching absolute zero.
Astronomers believe that some object, like a brown dwarf star, passing near the outer reaches of the Cloud, disturbs its gravitational equilibrium, causing one or more of the “icy snowballs” to fall toward the distant Sun. That idea is part of a consensus view of comets, in general: dirty snowballs that begin to melt as the Sun gradually warms them up.
According to a recent press release, scientists studying data from WISE, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope, discovered “about seven times more long-period comets measuring at least 1 kilometer” in diameter, and are “up to twice as large” as short-period comets. Short-period comets do not stray much beyond the orbit of Jupiter, so they can return every 20 years, or so. Long period comets, like Hale-Bopp, possess orbital periods of 2500 years, or more.
It must be noted that the Stardust cometary mission demonstrated that the existence of comets in such a far away and frigid nursery as the Oort Cloud is impossible, because minerals found in the coma of Comet Wild II indicates that it formed in an extremely hot environment. What can explain this conundrum?
Electric Universe theory argues that comets and other small bodies could form when interplanetary electric arcs enveloped Earth and nearby celestial objects. Since the catastrophic events detailed in many other articles and videos took place within the last 10,000 years, it is possible that crustal rocks and regolith were lifted into space by powerful electrodynamic fields. Most of that debris fell back onto the celestial bodies involved, but some large chunks most likely entered a variety of orbits.
If the gas giant planets were not so remote at some time in the past, and if rocky Solar System objects like Earth, Mars, Venus and moons of every stripe came within the influence of electromagnetic fields generated by massive bolts of electricity and energized plasmas, then many questions might be answered.
Why does Mars exhibit crustal magnetism concentrated in bands near its south pole, but it has no intrinsic magnetic field? What happened to its atmosphere, now less than .00125 that of Earth? Why does Venus, supposedly a multi-billion year old planet, have such a dense, hot atmosphere composed of carbon dioxide? Where did the gigantic, anomalous craters, discussed in many Pictures of the Day, come from? Why do comets become energized when they are far from the Sun, like the aforementioned Hale-Bopp did? Why do comets resemble asteroids, with no evidence that they are snowy dirtballs? Those are only a small sample of the puzzles that face modern science. Electric Universe theory sheds light on all of these questions, and many more.
Stephen Smith
