EC predicts that 100,000's of asteroids should be comets
23 August 2013 - updated the numbers.
EC universe: Rocky bodies that have an orbit with an eccentricity above a minimum value will be comets.
There may be other factors involved but since there is no actual EC model there is no list available.
There are observed
main-belt comets with a minimum eccentricity of 0.1644 (
133P/Elst-Pizarro). So the EC minimim must be this (or lower!).
Real universe: There are rocky bodies that have an orbit with an eccentricity above a minimum value that are
not comets.
In fact there are asteroids in orbits that are get close to cometary orbits, e.g.
2005 VX3 with an eccentricity of 0.9955142)
The
JPL Small-Body Database Browser has a
search engine. This shows that there are 234,719 cataloged asteroids with an eccentricity > 0.17.
The EC excuse (according to Sol88) is that low solar activity is the reason that these 234,719 cataloged asteroids are not comets. What Sol88 has not realized is that each asteroid is observed a number of times over a period of days to years. These 234,719 cataloged asteroids were not clse to the the Sun at the same instant of time. These asteroids were observed during
a range of solar activity. That range included times that comets were visible.
So how many of these should be comets?
EC has no actual physical model and so never gives numbers so we do not expect help there.
Conclusion: EC currently predicts that 100% of the 234,719 asteroids should be comets.
We could be generous and assume that average solar activity is needed and so there are 86,791 asteroids that should be comets according to the EC idea. But that can wait until an EC proponent comes up with actual observations related to EC
!
Good examples of the asteriods that should be comets according to the EC idea are many of the named asteroids:
- Juno (e=0.2553, observed over a span of 67,610 days).
- Pallas (e=0.2309, observed over a span of 64,291 days)
- Astraea (e=0.1917, observed over a span of 59,759 days)
- ...More than 46 other named asteroids observed 1000's of times over decades.
- Vera (e=0.1939, observed over a span of 45,191 days)
This analysis is in fact being generous to the EC idea. A stricter analysis would be to look at the orbital parameters of all comets (not just main-belt comets). This shows that the comet 158P/Kowal-LINEAR has an eccentricity of 0.0279 and a perihelion distance of 4.594 AU.
There are 605,650 asteroids with eccentricities greater than the minimum observed eccentricity of comets (0.0279). These should be EC comets.
Another EC excuse (according to solrey), is that
composition plays a part determning whether "discharges" happen. He completely forgets about calculating the energy of these discharges as usual with EC proponents.
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