Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks has been dubbed the ‘Devil Comet’ because its two bright tails resemble horns. This enormous comet, whose nucleus is about 12.4 miles across, has produced two dramatic outbursts, most recently in October 2023. This unexpected activity has puzzled astronomers being so distant from the Sun.
As described in a Science Alert piece, “The Pons-Brooks comet, by contrast, is exploding relatively often and, confoundingly, far away from the Sun…it’s further off than Mars, where it’s just not that warm.” That raises the question: “Where’s the energy coming from that powers these kinds of large outbursts?”
The EU Model has always proposed that comets are not icy blobs that accreted or condensed at the dawn of the solar system billions of years ago. This prediction is vindicated by every comet mission, which reveals comet nuclei are desiccated and shockingly geologically complex.
Cometary outbursts at impossible distances from the Sun—or comets exploding at similarly vast distances—is not a new puzzle as independent researcher Stuart Talbott makes clear.
