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Small Comet bombardment of Earth!

robinson

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It sounds like a Science Fiction story, but in reality it was more like a warzone, which for those familiar with Internet Forums, should be no surprise.

If I had the time I would type out the story here, making it dramatic and painful to read, much like the real events that led up to the discovery and acceptance of small (house sized) comets bombarding the Earth, every few seconds.

Enough water from space (somewhere around a million tons a day) to explain why the oceans have not dried up.

Why observers have reported flashes on the moon, strange unknown objects transversing the sun, mysterious UFOs filmed by NASA, and why there are all those holes in the upper atmosphere, where the ultraviolet dayglow has been absorbed over areas of 50 to 100 km in diameter.

If you think I'm making all this up, then you would be like almost every other scientist in the world when they first heard about it.

If you want to flame, insult, dismiss and ignore this post, you definitely are like every scientist on the planet.

And who can blame you? It sounds like a delusional mind has gone round the bend. Or some kind of fraud, a scam, something. But it all started with scientific observations, and a few lone voices that focused on reality, rather than the opinions of people who didn't have a clue.

It is a great story, one of scientist moving the goalpost, refusing to listen, and even when faced with evidence, using that time tested method of scientific debunking, the claim that "If this were true somebody would have discovered it already! So it can't be true!"

Most of it is in the following links, but and there is more out there. If you feel like debunking before you read it all, you should know this is a very old story, so study up before you re-invent the wheel here.

Links, in no particular order.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9705/28/comet.storm/index.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/276/5317/1333
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15520904.600-not-a-snowballs-chance.html
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast09dec97_2.htm
http://www.pacinst.org/publications/worlds_water/worlds_water_2002_water_in_space.pdf
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/09/980910074516.htm
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/headline_universe/small_feb.html&edu=high
http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/faq.htmlx

A good place to read it as a story
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/preslectures/frank99/index.html

Very interesting stuff. If you were part of it at the time, you would never forget it. And also not want to start a topic about it.

http://www.mkzdk.org/twitcher/oort.
http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/iro/

etc etc

Lots more linked from pages above.

Enjoy. And remember, if it is true, a hundred or more hit the earth while you read this.
 
robinson said:
It sounds like a Science Fiction story, but in reality it was more like a warzone, which for those familiar with Internet Forums, should be no surprise.

If I had the time I would type out the story here, making it dramatic and painful to read, much like the real events that led up to the discovery and acceptance of small (house sized) comets bombarding the Earth, every few seconds.

Enough water from space (somewhere around a million tons a day) to explain why the oceans have not dried up.

Why observers have reported flashes on the moon, strange unknown objects transversing the sun, mysterious UFOs filmed by NASA, and why there are all those holes in the upper atmosphere, where the ultraviolet dayglow has been absorbed over areas of 50 to 100 km in diameter.

If you think I'm making all this up, then you would be like almost every other scientist in the world when they first heard about it.

If you want to flame, insult, dismiss and ignore this post, you definitely are like every scientist on the planet.

And who can blame you? It sounds like a delusional mind has gone round the bend. Or some kind of fraud, a scam, something. But it all started with scientific observations, and a few lone voices that focused on reality, rather than the opinions of people who didn't have a clue.

It is a great story, one of scientist moving the goalpost, refusing to listen, and even when faced with evidence, using that time tested method of scientific debunking, the claim that "If this were true somebody would have discovered it already! So it can't be true!"

Most of it is in the following links, but and there is more out there. If you feel like debunking before you read it all, you should know this is a very old story, so study up before you re-invent the wheel here.

Links, in no particular order.

http://www.cnn.com/TECH/9705/28/comet.storm/index.html
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/276/5317/1333
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15520904.600-not-a-snowballs-chance.html
http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast09dec97_2.htm
http://www.pacinst.org/publications/worlds_water/worlds_water_2002_water_in_space.pdf
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1998/09/980910074516.htm
http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/headline_universe/small_feb.html&edu=high
http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/faq.htmlx

A good place to read it as a story
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/preslectures/frank99/index.html

Very interesting stuff. If you were part of it at the time, you would never forget it. And also not want to start a topic about it.

http://www.mkzdk.org/twitcher/oort.
http://smallcomets.physics.uiowa.edu/iro/

etc etc

Lots more linked from pages above.

Enjoy. And remember, if it is true, a hundred or more hit the earth while you read this.
Click to expand...

How did you get to your low estimate of "like a million tons a day" of water?
 
From one of robinsons links:

"He calculates that the comets add enough water to provide an extra one-thousandth of a millimetre of rainfall each year..............................."

I haven't done the math, but that may not be a million tons a day.

Overall, at first glance, this seems to be credible.

Now we know where the fungus came from. Heck, otherworldly origin of life theory ("panspermia?") could use this as well.

There is a lot of water in the solar system, besides the stuff we have here on The Blue Planet.
 
There was an article about this many years ago in the old publication OMNI. Seemed entirely reasonable.
 
I read about this many years ago and heard nothing about it again so I figured it was bogus. It still might turn out to be nothing, but I like a good mystery.

I don't like calling them "small comets", though, as even the "discoverers" say they're not like regular comets in that they lack any dust at all.
 
Wangler said:
From one of robinsons links:

"He calculates that the comets add enough water to provide an extra one-thousandth of a millimetre of rainfall each year..............................."

I haven't done the math, but that may not be a million tons a day.
Click to expand...

Sounds about right: the earth is a big place. Radius 6.4x106m, surface area 4\pi r2 = 5x1014m2. So 10-6m per year is 5x108m3 per year, i.e., about 1.4 million tons a day.
 
Apathia said:
Is there some way we can capture these comets and bottle the water?
I see $$$!
Click to expand...

If it's money you're after, all you need to do is persuade people that you have captured and bottled comet-water. You don't have to go to the trouble of doing it, nor will it matter if they don't actually exist.
 
CapelDodger said:
If these things are hitting us, why don't we see them hitting Mars? Surely they'd show up.
Click to expand...

Again, I suggest reading the documentation before raising objections. You can be sure every astronomer and armchair skeptic brought up almost any objection you can imagine when this first was proposed. Remember, the theory was to explain the data from the satellites and ground based observations, it was not thought up by somebody, but used to explain observations.

Forget Mars, what about the moon? Why don't they hit satellites? The shuttle? How come you can't see them period?

It is a fascinating story.
 
CapelDodger said:
If these things are hitting us, why don't we see them hitting Mars? Surely they'd show up.
Click to expand...


Part of our evidence is from radar scanning there are events in thw way upper atmosphere that would match these cometary bodies.

We are very far away from mars, i am not sure what kind of resolution we would need to see events this size.
 
fuelair said:
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast18may_1.htm (2001)
Looks good, not certain, been going on awhile.
Click to expand...

Nice link. Thank yee much, I had not viewed that before.

According to some laboratory experiments, a comet born billions of years ago ago in the neighborhood of Jupiter would contain about the same fraction of heavy water as Earth's present-day oceans. Unfortunately, Comet LINEAR broke up before this could be directly confirmed, but its low concentration of volatile organic molecules provides a strong indication that it carried the same kind of water that fills terrestrial seas.

Comets born near Jupiter are rare today because the giant planet's gravity long ago flung most of them into interstellar space. Nevertheless, they would have been numerous during the solar system's formative years.
Click to expand...

I always wonder when I read stuff like that, where does all the water come from? Based on the latest measurements and theory, there is a very large amount of water in the Universe, and very much of it in our local system.

I've never read a convincing argument of how it formed. Fascinating. Science marches on.
 
CapelDodger said:
If these things are hitting us, why don't we see them hitting Mars? Surely they'd show up.
Click to expand...

Just speculating, but if they are hitting us, they're likely hitting mars, the moon, venus, and every other large gravity well.

In the case of mars, isn't there evidence of large amounts of underground water? Perhaps the comets are hitting mars but don't burn up in the very thin atmosphere and end up burying themselves in the surface.

In the case of the moon, the comet would certainly bury itself in the impact, and then slowly evaporate (boil away) in the vacuum.

In the case of venus, can't say.

Just guessing.
 
I think the point Capeldodger makes is precisely that while Earth's thick atmosphere makes the idea plausible here, similar sized bodies infalling on Mars (or indeed the moon) would reach the surface intact and should indeed be highly visible.

One possible loophole would be if these bodies do exist but are actually terrestrial in origin.
Any free hydrogen in our atmosphere will escape into space in short order. Oxygen may do so too. Plenty of energy up there. Maybe the water is actually from Earth? A few molecules gravitate together, then a few droplets...then a few tons...a long term evaporation / precipitation cycle. Is this remotely possible?
 
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Soapy Sam said:
I think the point Capeldodger makes is precisely that while Earth's thick atmosphere makes the idea plausible here, similar sized bodies infalling on Mars (or indeed the moon) would reach the surface intact and should indeed be highly visible.
Click to expand...
These comets fall apart at an altitude above where the space shuttle orbits. So, moon yes, Mars no.
Soapy Sam said:
One possible loophole would be if these bodies do exist but are actually terrestrial in origin.
Any free hydrogen in our atmosphere will escape into space in short order. Oxygen may do so too. Plenty of energy up there. Maybe the water is actually from Earth? A few molecules gravitate together, then a few droplets...then a few tons...a long term evaporation / precipitation cycle. Is this remotely possible?
Click to expand...
Not likely and there is really no need to posit such a mechanism. Water is extremely common in the solar system.
 
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