The Coming Cometary Catastrophe

Impending Doom? Perhaps.




This thread is intended to coalesce relevant data regarding past cometary / asteroidal impacts on Earth and other planets, research and discussion on the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt, discuss probability of collisions and near misses, predct impending catastrophe, and attempt to conclude that we are indeed on the cusp of increased risk of total destruction from either an asteroidal , cometary, fragmenting comet , or combination of these in the not too distant future.

I will put forth data regarding Mars, its massive impact craters and tharsis bulges as evidence of a plant killing cometary impacts, Jupiter and SL9, the crossing of the galactic plane as a precursor to increased impact risk, and other relevant data.

As always I look forward to a good discussion with all ATS subscribers, and will enjoy all of your data and feedback.

Regards
Alias Jones

Next Post soon

How are going to compile all of this information. Is it going to be a collection of recent impact predictions from ATS, or impending 'hits'?

I am not going to use predictions, rather I intend to show that our risk of a major impact is unknown, poorly scouted, and increasing due to our solar system crossing into the galactic plane and that as such objects in the Oort cloud and Kuiper belt will increasingly be sent towards the inner solar system to the sun , thus crossing Erath's orbit.

I will put forth my main argumnets in my next post

Im eagerly anticipating it alias jones, iv read bits here and there about the possible consequences of our sun crossing the galactic plane but havnt looked into it too far.

Oort Cloud





The Oort cloud is an immense spherical cloud surrounding the planetary system and extending approximately 3 light years, about 30 trillion kilometers from the Sun. This vast distance is considered the edge of the Sun's orb of physical, gravitational, or dynamical influence.
Within the cloud, comets are typically tens of millions of kilometers apart. They are weakly bound to the sun, and passing stars and other forces can readily change their orbits, sending them into the inner solar system or out to interstellar space. This is especially true of comets on the outer edges of the Oort cloud. The structure of the cloud is believed to consist of a relatively dense core that lies near the ecliptic plane and gradually replenishes the outer boundaries, creating a steady state. One sixth of an estimated six trillion icy objects or comets are in the outer region with the remainder in the relatively dense core.

In addition to stellar perturbations where another star's Oort cloud passes through or close to the Sun's Oort cloud, are the influences of giant molecular clouds and tidal forces. A giant molecular-cloud is by far more massive than the Sun. It is an accumulation of cold hydrogen that is the birthplace of stars and solar systems. These are infrequently encountered, about every 300-500 million years, but when they are encountered, they can violently redistribute comets within the Oort cloud.

Tidal forces affecting the Oort cloud come from stars in the Milky Way's galactic disk with some pull from the galactic core. The tide results from the sun and comets being different distances from these massive amounts of matter. The force on the comets from these tides is greater than the perturbations of passing stars, and comets beyond 200,000 AU are easily lost to interstellar space. This pull contributes to the steady state which replenishes the outer comets that are randomly distributed away from the ecliptic plane.

The total mass of comets in the Oort cloud is estimated to be 40 times that of Earth. This matter is believed to have originated at different distances and therefore temperatures from the sun, which explains the compositional diversity observed in comets.

Typical noontime temperatures are four degrees Celsius above absolute zero. As temperatures move toward absolute zero, the kinetic energy of the molecules approach a finite value. Absolute zero should not be considered a state of zero energy without motion. There still remains some molecular energy, although it is at a minimum, at absolute zero.

The Oort cloud is the source of long-period comets and possibly higher-inclination intermediate comets that were pulled into shorter period orbits by the planets, such as Halley and Swift-Tuttle. Comets can also shift their orbits due to jets of gas and dust that rocket from their icy surface as they approach the sun. Although they get off course, comets do have initial orbits with widely different ranges, from 200 years to once every million years or more. Comets entering the planetary region for the first time, come from an average distance of 44,000 astronomical units.

Long period comets can appear at any time and come from any direction. Bright comets can usually be seen every 5-10 years. Two recent Oort cloud comets were Hyakutake and Hale-Bopp. Hyakutake was average in size, but came to 0.10 AU (15,000,000 km) from Earth, which made it appear especially spectacular. Hale-Bopp, on the other hand, was an unusually large and dynamic comet, ten times that of Halley at comparable distances from the sun, making it appear quite bright, even though it did not approach closer than 1.32 AU (197,000,000 km) to the Earth.

LINK TO TEXT: www.solarviews.com...


KUIPER BELT:

www.solarviews.com...

In 1950, Dutch astronomer Jan Oort hypothesized that comets came from a vast shell of icy bodies about 50,000 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. A year later astronomer Gerard Kuiper suggested that some comet-like debris from the formation of the solar system should also be just beyond Neptune. In fact, he argued, it would be unusual not to find such a continuum of particles since this would imply the primordial solar system has a discrete "edge."
This notion was reinforced by the realization that there is a separate population of comets, called the Jupiter family, that behave strikingly different than those coming from the far reaches of the Oort cloud. Besides orbiting the Sun in less than 20 years (as opposed to 200 million years for an Oort member), the comets are unique because their orbits lie near the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. In addition, all these comets go around the Sun in the same direction as the planets.

Kuiper's hypothesis was reinforced in the early 1980s when computer simulations of the solar system's formation predicted that a disk of debris should naturally form around the edge of the solar system. According to this scenario, planets would have agglomerated quickly in the inner region of the Sun's primordial circumstellar disk, and gravitationally swept up residual debris. However, beyond Neptune, the last of the gas giants, there should be a debris-field of icy objects that never coalesced to form planets.

The Kuiper belt remained theory until the 1992 detection of a 150-mile wide body, called 1992QB1 at the distance of the suspected belt. Several similar-sized objects were discovered quickly confirming the Kuiper belt was real. The planet Pluto, discovered in 1930, is considered the largest member of this Kuiper belt region. Also, Neptune's satellites, Triton and Nereid, and Saturn's satellite, Phoebe are in unusual orbits and may be captured Kuiper belt objects.

LINK TO TEXT: www.solarviews.com...

Far beyond the orbit of Neptune, nearly halfway to the nearest stars, our solar system is surrounded by a vast spherical reservoir of comets known as the Oort cloud. In the classical view, first proposed by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort in 1950, these comets remain in the distant reservoir until a passing star perturbs the cloud, diverting some of the comets toward the inner solar system. Once close to the Sun, the comets may careen through the solar system for thousands of years until they are ejected into interstellar space or until they collide with another body such as a planet.

This scenario has largely been accepted for several decades now as the most likely explanation for the orbital habits of certain comets--except that a passing nearby star is no longer seen as the primary perturber of the Oort cloud. Some recent developments suggest other explanations. The resulting debate has implications not just for the celestial mechanics of comets, but for theories about the mass extinctions of species that shape life on earth.

For those unfamiliar with the theories, a brief history lesson should provide some background for the present debate. As the story goes, every 26 million years or so the fossil record seems to record the extinction of an abnormally great number of species. The cycle can be traced back through the past 250 million years and just happens to include the extinction event at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, that marked the end of the dinosaurs. This finding alone is remarkable, but it became even more so when several groups of scientists independently proposed that the cause of the extinctions was nothing less than a periodic bombardment of projectiles from space.

The intellectual climate was ripe for the idea: Only a few years earlier the discovery of a deposit of iridium in the rocks of the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary suggested to some scientists that an extraterrestrial impactor had wiped out the dinosaurs. Especially intriguing was the finding that the record of terrestrial impacts seemed to have a 28- to 32-million-year cycle. The apparent convergence of the extinctions and the impacts on a near 30-million-year cycle kindled a cosmic question: What mechanism could drive a cycle of extinctions and impacts with such an enormously long period?

Among the more intriguing responses was a theory that linked the extinction cycle to another well-known cycle: the periodic oscillation of the solar system, back and forth across the plane of the Milky Way galaxy, about once every 30 million to 35 million years. The extinctions appeared to be occurring just when the solar system was crossing the densest part of the galactic disk. According to the proponents of the theory, the Oort cloud was being greatly perturbed by something in the galactic midplane, and this caused a catastrophic rain of comets on the inner solar system (including the earth) every 30 million years.

Some thought that the perturbing something was the gravitational effect of giant molecular clouds situated in the midplane of the galactic disk. Others disagreed with this notion, arguing that the effects of the giant molecular clouds should be about as strong in the midplane as they are above and below the plane at the galactic latitudes traversed by the solar system.

At just about the time this issue was being debated, several Oort-cloud experts proposed that the cumulative effects of the local matter in the plane perpendicular to the galactic disk--the so-called disk tides--were far more significant than the intermittent gravitational effects of passing stars or giant molecular clouds. This threw a small wrench into the oscillating-solar-system theory because it wasn't clear just how the disk tides would modulate the flux of comets at different heights above or below the galactic midplane. Some scientists were unperturbed by the absence of a precise understanding, however, taking it on faith that the strength of the disk tides would be sufficient to give the Oort cloud a good kick every 30 million years.

And so the matter stood until 1995, when John Matese and Patrick Whitman of the University of Southwestern Louisiana and their colleagues Mauri Valtonen of Finland and Kimmo Innanen of Canada attempted to assess the quantitative effects of the disk tides. Their numerical models of Oort-cloud dynamics suggested that as the solar system oscillates through the galactic plane, the disk tides modulate the comet flux from the Oort cloud by a ratio of about 4 to 1, with the greatest effect in the midplane of the galaxy (Icarus 1995, 116:255). The results brought new life to the theory by providing a mechanism for the 30-million-year galactic clock.

It was enough to convince some scientists that there might be something to the theory after all. Notable among these is Gene Shoemaker of the U.S. Geological Survey, who at one time believed that the periodicity was a "statistical fluke." The work of Matese and his colleagues convinced him that the "impact surges are real... and that [the comet flux is] controlled by the fluctuating galactic tidal forces." The Matese study, he said, "is a landmark contribution in understanding the history of bombardment of the earth."

Recently, Matese and his colleague Daniel Whitmire have taken their studies of the Oort-perturbing effects of the galaxy a step further (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, November 20, 1996). Their analysis of a selected group of comet orbits indicates that the entire galaxy, including the distant matter at its central core, plays a role in jostling some comets free of the cloud. Unlike the disk tides, these distant-matter tides exert their effects within the plane of the galactic disk. Whereas the disk tides might account for about two-thirds of all Oort-cloud comets that we observe, the distant-matter tides may be responsible for nearly another one-third. (Perturbing effects of nearby stars and giant molecular clouds account for a small remainder.) The distant-matter tides turn out to be significantly more important than anyone would have imagined, including the authors. "We didn't expect to detect an effect from distant galactic matter at all," said Matese. "It was a completely serendipitous discovery."

Not everyone agrees that Matese and Whitmire have made an adequate case for the existence of distant-matter tides. Paul Weissman of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California points out that "the effects of the [distant-matter] tides only show up when a small subset of the comet data are used." Matese responds that the subset was selected so that only "high-quality classes of comets with well-determined orbits" would be included in the analysis.

As for the role of the distant-matter tides in the 30-million-year cycle of Oort-cloud perturbations, Matese admits that it is too soon to say. "We don't know whether it will increase or decrease the 4-to-1 modulation effect of the disk tides, but it probably won't be a large change."

Either way, Weissman doesn't think it will make a difference for the oscillating-solar-system theory of cosmic impacts and periodic extinctions. "If you consider that [Oort-cloud] comets only account for 25 percent of the impacts on the earth at present, and the fact that the comet flux is currently at the maximum point of the 4-to-1 modulation, then the [disk tide] is only modulating the frequency of one-quarter of all impacts." He adds, "Going through the galactic plane is not like going over a speed bump. There is a broad distribution of matter, and the solar system oscillates slowly through it. The modulation effect is gradual; it shouldn't produce a dramatic spike in the comet flux." Weissman believes that asteroids, which account for most of the other 75 percent of the impact craters on the earth, play a greater role in the impact extinctions.

Matese counters that although Oort-cloud comets may only account for 25 percent of the terrestrial impacts, they are disproportionately the larger impact craters: "Impactors that make craters greater than 100 kilometers in diameter are the ones that play the key role in the extinction events." He notes that comet impacts appear to be potentially responsible for the four largest terrestrial-impact craters known: Chesapeake Bay on the East Coast of the United States and Popagai in Siberia (both dated at 35 million years), Chicxulub on the Yucat�n peninsula (65 million years old and suspected of being produced by the impactor that may have killed the dinosaurs) and Manicouagan in Quebec (dated at 210 million years). In turn, Weissman points out that "it is very difficult to determine what type of object caused a particular crater because the impactor is vaporized in the impact. Others have claimed that Chicxulub was caused by an asteroid, not a comet."

The supporting or confuting evidence for these ideas should be in the rocks and perhaps in the orbital dynamics of distant comets. For the time being it appears that the Oort comet cloud and the galaxy will continue to be entangled with the dinosaur extinctions and extraterrestrial impactors.

LINK TO TEXT:

www.americanscientist.org...

MORE SOON

ECLPITIC PLANE:




The Sun's position at the inner edge of the Orion spiral arm ensures that we are currently in the active phase. Further, the solar system has just passed through the plane of the galaxy where the tidal stresses acting on the comet cloud [Oort cloud] are at their maximum; the comet flux is therefore near a strong peak of its galactic cycle. It has also recently passed through Gould's belt and is therefore undergoing an exceptional tidal stress due to a recent passage through an old, disintegrating molecular cloud [GMC's - gigantic molecular clouds]... The conditions which would yield an exceptional flux of comets on to Earth -- positioning near the galactic plane, proximity to a spiral arm, and recent passage through a system of molecular clouds -- are all simultaneously met by the solar system at the present time.
Victor Clube and William Napier, Cosmic Serpent, Pg. 215, 216

"The Sun is locked in a vast orbit around the galactic nucleus [core], completing each revolution in a period of approximately 250 million years."
Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th Edition, "Milky Way" - Also Pg. 237, The Mars Mystery, Graham Hancock

David Morrison of NASA's Ames Research Center, Comets and Origin, P.254:
"It is possible for a comet to 'sneak up' on Earth, escaping detection until it is only a few weeks from impact. A perpetual survey is required to detect long-period comets, and even with such a survey we cannot be sure of
success."

"The Milky Way rotates around an axis joining the galactic poles. Viewed from the north galactic pole the rotation of the Milky Way is clockwise. In the area of the solar system the period of rotation is more than 200 million years."
Encarta 98 Desk Encyclopedia, 1996-97 Microsoft Corporation, "Milky Way"

Cosmic Catastrophism is Real: "I think that part of the suns increase in activity has to do with the photon belt that our solar system is passing into. It is an area if much higher energy that our solar system passes through on occasion. Since the sun is electrically driven then that would explain why it is getting so active." The response, then made a direct reference to this link: www.crawford2000.co.uk... whereupon the reader is linked to a page, which tells the reader that the poster of the material at the page in question, does not know where the following article came from, and then is led directly to the first paragraph of the material, which states: "There is a pulse coming from the centre of the galaxy (galactic core), which has now been measured and discovered by astronomers to and is known as the Photon Belt. There are also other sources of energies entering our Solar System such as Cosmic and Gamma rays. The Solar system itself follows a 26,000 year orbit around the galactic core and we enter this "Photon Belt" of energies every 13,500 years. Scientists are now measuring Pk readings that have increased six fold and we are also experiencing massively increased solar flare and Coronal Mass Ejection Activity."

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applause on your posts

~~~

on Cosmic Catastrophisms

alludings to McCanneys electromagnetic cometary capicator model

? more emphasis? material on gamma & X-ray bursts arising from the Galactic Center Black-Hole, causing a mass-extinction event, again

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on the Photon Belt...photon band.....??
google up a slew of pages that say its' ...

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Yeah good effort jones, informative, but i believe the photon belt was debunked a while ago.

There is evidence that the great Chicago fire in the 1800's was caused by a meteor shower from a comet trail. There is historical evidence that "similar" fires happened within a few miles of the "big" city but got little attention. You might want to check this out. I think the article was in the New Yorker mag about 7 years ago.

As usual, in a "scientific" discussion, this thread presumes that results, effects and outcomes of cometary activity are random, non-intentional and perverse; that mankind has no recourse, no control, no Overseer keeping the planet and its environs, stable.

This is what frustrates me about tehno-people. Their Universe leaves out the whole function of INTENTION.

[shrug]

Intention? Has it occured to you that perhaps the grand intention of the Cosmic Maker is for Earth to be strifed by fragmenting comets rendering this planet a barren wasteland?

If intention is to be discussed there is no more reason to belive that the the " Greater Mind " is benevolent, nor any reason to assume that our infantile civilization deserves divine intervention .

It seems more logical to me that as a function of freewill and intellgence , the method of prevention, or escape is left up to us. I would like to believe that that the merciful hand of God will forgive, and cast away the impending doom, however I believe the ancients where aware of such an increase of impacts and associated risks ( due to factors in the text of this thread ), have puprosefully recorded ( in architecture and script ) the devastation dealt civilization throughout the ages, and have warned us as to the coming crisis,

There is not a question of wheter or not Earth will be hit by major planet killing space debris, but rather only the onimous question of when. This thread was started to examine the possibility that such an occassion is due to happen sooner rather than later

Alias Jones

And I agree with you, that all physical signs point to major changes coming.

But I also feel our Progenitor is in charge of Change; and humanity will benefit from being pruned--and not suffer extinction.

I believe our Progenitor is also our Benefactor, since it is in His/Her Interest to evolve humans and not merely allow them to be squandered.

But that's just my "take" on it.

Chai

Here are a couple of things to look at, to understand the instabilities that our solar system is experiencing

www.godlikeproductions.com.../14/04&replies=24

coming from

www.jmccanneyscience.com...

This is the beginning of Astronomers admitting to instability. And now, for pictures of that instability--the "bouncing" that is occurring to the earth due to "wobble" of the ecliptic--that "dinner plate" electric field on which or in which all our planets "float."

Comets entering the solar system also float on the ecliptic; and they plough into the sun following the surface path of the ecliptic.

But, what's happened?

For the last several weeks, bodies hitting the sun [and, yes, making holes in it] have been following a sine-wave path, viz

[And I'm not even going to talk about the "hole", not going there. Egad.]

The brown dwarf in question, being 20-50 times the mass of Jupiter, affects the conformation, angle and position of the ecliptic itself due to its approaching mass and magnetic fields.

You can see this happening in these SOHO IET photos. It's right in front of our faces.

No wonder the Sun is heating up; it has an alter-Ego "snuggling up to it" that is also very huge and hot--just dim--barely visible at this point.

We do live [and we will die] "in interesting times."

Originally posted by Emily_Cragg
For the last several weeks, bodies hitting the sun [and, yes, making holes in it] have been following a sine-wave path, viz

[And I'm not even going to talk about the "hole", not going there. Egad.]

What? No. Just no, okay? Nothing has hit the Sun. If something hit the Sun it would be on the news. It would be echoed about through astronomy circles. Those are just SOHO images showing holes in the Sun's corona. Holes caused by magnetic field disrutions, among other things. Not from objects hitting the Sun.

The brown dwarf in question, being 20-50 times the mass of Jupiter, affects the conformation, angle and position of the ecliptic itself due to its approaching mass and magnetic fields.

Okay, so that would put this object to near half the mass of the Sun (If I did my math in my head right; if not someone let me know.) Anyway, something that massive would tragically skew the ecliptic and throw everything in the Solar System out of wack. So just no again...

EDIT:
All in all, very great posts AJ!

[edit on 11/14/2004 by cmdrkeenkid]

Sorry, but this object has been observed all over the place.

*************

** EMERGENCY POSTING **

We have made the first unambiguous detection and image of an elusive type of object known as a brown dwarf.

The evidence consists of an image from the 60-inch observatory on Mt. Palomar, a spectrum from the 200-inch Hale telescope on Mt. Palomar and a confirmatory image from NASA�s Hubble Space Telescope. The collaborative effort involved astronomers at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. as well as a team of astronomers from the Black Birch Astronomic Observatory in New Zealand.

The brown dwarf, called Harrington 911A (HA911A), is a small companion to the cool star Sedna, located in our solar system today, and making its passing from the south. Estimated to be 20 to 50 times the mass of Jupiter, 911A is too massive and hot to be classified as a planet as we know it, but too small and cool to shine like a star. At least 100,000 times dimmer than Earth�s Sun, the brown dwarf is the faintest object ever seen moving through our solar system.

"This is the first time we have ever observed an object in our solar system which possesses a spectrum that is astonishingly just like that of a gas giant planet," said Shrinivas Kulkarni, a member of the team from Caltech.

As will be reported on CNN sometime the week of November15th, the President was briefed recently (in a secret session) at an emergency meeting with the American Astronomical Society in Arlington, Virginia, that the U.S. Naval Observatory team has found the tenth planet. Passage of this brown dwarf is �imminent�

Cal Tech Scientist

**************

I'm afraid your wishing "NO" will not affects its existence in our solar system.

Originally posted by Emily_Cragg
Sorry, but this object has been observed all over the place.

Provide links to your "information" please.

The evidence consists of an image from the 60-inch observatory on Mt. Palomar, a spectrum from the 200-inch Hale telescope on Mt. Palomar and a confirmatory image from NASA�s Hubble Space Telescope. The collaborative effort involved astronomers at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. as well as a team of astronomers from the Black Birch Astronomic Observatory in New Zealand.

Originally posted by Emily_Cragg

The brown dwarf, called Harrington 911A (HA911A), is a small companion to the cool star Sedna, located in our solar system today, and making its passing from the south.

Ok you got me slightly confused. How can an object be both part of our solar system and in orbit around another star? A referral to a tenth planet implies an orbit around our star. If this brown dwarf is a companion to another star called Sedna, isn't that star light years away?

Originally posted by Emily_Cragg
** EMERGENCY POSTING **

We have made the first unambiguous detection and image of an elusive type of object known as a brown dwarf.

The evidence consists of an image from the 60-inch observatory on Mt. Palomar, a spectrum from the 200-inch Hale telescope on Mt. Palomar and a confirmatory image from NASA�s Hubble Space Telescope. The collaborative effort involved astronomers at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, and the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. as well as a team of astronomers from the Black Birch Astronomic Observatory in New Zealand.

Fascinating. I believe she is referring to Discovery of a Brown Dwarf from SEDS 1995 Archive. The object is located 19 light-years from Earth. Sedna is a planetoid, not a star as far as I know. I think we can rest easy now.

Even if this object wern't a load of bullox, 20-50 times the mass of Jupiter isn't big enough to create a brown drawf. A body has to have at least 80 times the mass of Jupiter to sustain fusion.

And I am yet to find anything about this on an *actual* scientific website.