© NASA/JPL
This photograph of Halley's Comet was taken January 13,1986, by James W. Young, resident astronomer of JPL's Table Mountain Observatory in the San Bernardino Mountains, using the 24-inch reflective telescope.
The ancients had ample reason to view comets as harbingers of doom, it would appear.
A piece of the famous Halley's comet likely slammed into Earth in A.D. 536, blasting so much dust into the atmosphere that the planet cooled considerably, a new study suggests.
This dramatic climate shift is linked to drought and famine around the world,
which may have made humanity more susceptible to "Justinian's plague" in A.D. 541-542 - the first recorded emergence of
the Black Death in Europe.
The new results come from an analysis of Greenland ice that was laid down between A.D. 533 and 540.
The ice cores record large amounts of atmospheric dust during this seven-year period, not all of it originating on Earth.
"I have all this extraterrestrial stuff in my ice core," study leader Dallas Abbott, of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, told LiveScience here last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
Certain characteristics, such as high levels of tin, identify a comet as the origin of the alien dust, Abbott said. And the stuff was deposited during the Northern Hemisphere spring, suggesting that it came from the Eta Aquarid meteor shower - material shed by Halley's comet that Earth plows through every April-May.
The Eta Aquarid dust may be responsible for a period of mild cooling in 533, Abbott said, but it alone cannot explain the global dimming event of 536-537, during which the planet may have cooled by as much as 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius). For that, something more dramatic is required.
Comment: Historical accounts record multiple air blasts, so more likely than one 'random' cometary event is multiple smaller blasts over a period of time. Read
Comets and the Horns of Moses to see how cyclical catastrophe unfolded in the Dark Age that came before the post-Roman Dark Age. Same model, same story: the comets don't directly cause the famines which weaken the populations, followed by the plague. The populations are already weakened by 'climate change' and food shortages due to a corrupt and ensconced elite, then one or two larger chunks of space rock deliver the payload - a comet-borne virus or two that humanity has little to no immunity against.
Comment: There has been much research that indicates that the plague was actually a result of cometary bombardment. The evidence actually supports what the people said at that time, reporting earthquakes, comets, rains of death and fire, corrupted atmosphere, and death on a scale that is almost unimaginable. For more background information read:
New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection
New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection
Black Death Study Lets Rats Off the Hook