A comet or asteroid smashed into modern-day Germany some 2,200 years ago, unleashing energy equivalent to thousands of atomic bombs, scientists reported on Friday.

It appears that predictions made by Wal Thornhill and the Electric Comet model are being quickly confirmed, whether mainstream astronomers like it or not. In the end, it seems nature will be the arbiter of which model is the most accurate and predictive.

At the end of the year [1664] we saw shortly after each other two tail-stars or comets arising in the sky. The first one, in the southeast, was to be seen for almost two months. After that another one appeared in the southeast. The appearance of these celestial bodies, caused a big panic in the country. The war-fleet was standing by, the guards of the ports were reinforced, all fortresses were provided with extra provisions and extra munitions, while cavalry and infantry were exercising daily. Also was it not allowed to light any lamps, especially not in the cities along the coast. This fear was caused by the fact that when the Tartarians invaded the country, there were also similar signs in the firmament, as well as at the beginning of the war with the Japanese.

©Unknown

On this day in 1664, as described in the book "Cape Cod Historical Almanac" by Donald G. Trayser, "the people of Cape Cod and other parts of New England saw the last of a great comet which excited fear and awe. It appeared November 8th last, and continued to this date, the third comet witnessed by early settlers in the space of 12 years.

Boston University astronomers released new images of Mercury that capture both the source regions of and, for the first time, the extraordinary length of the planet's comet-like tail. Earlier research had mapped-out Mercury's sodium gas tail to approximately 40,000 kilometers, but planetary scientists from BU's Center for Space Physics (CSP) have found that the tail can extend more than 2.5 million kilometers, or 1.5 million miles, from the planet.

©Center for Space Physics, Boston University

Mercury's tail of sodium gas captured by a wide-angle telescope showing an enormous extent of the atoms escaping from the planet's surface. The insert shows the source regions of the tail gases imaged at a different time using a very narrow field of view telescope. The source regions occur at high latitudes, probably related to solar wind access to Mercury's surface along specific magnetic field lines. The impacts of the solar wind ions and electrons result in sputtering sodium from the surface. Since Mercury is close to the Sun, the sputtered atoms are pushed away by the pressure of light, with this photon radiation pressure leading to the long tail. The brightness of the source regions is about 1 million times greater than the faintest part of the distant tail. The sizes of the source regions span about 1/2 of the planet's radius, while the tail extends to about 1500 times the radius of the planet, about 1.5 million miles.

Will humans need to live as space nomads to survive? Possibly, says Neil deGrasse Tyson of the American Museum of Natural History.

"It may be," says Tyson, "that our only insurance policy against extinction is to become a multi-planet, space faring species."

Worries of climate change and unexpected catastrophe on Earth, compounded with humankind's natural curiosity about what lies beyond, compel private industry and NASA alike not only to wonder "what if," but to prepare for the "when."

A smack from a small comet in the 1980s may be responsible for ripples in one of Saturn's rings, images from NASA's Cassini spacecraft suggest. The finding is another indication that the rings are not static and can change on human timescales.

Cassini observations have revealed bright and dark bands in Saturn's innermost ring, called the D ring. The bands are getting more closely spaced as time goes on - Hubble Space Telescope images reveal they were 60 kilometres apart in 1995 and Cassini shows they have been shrinking over the last few years and are just 30 km apart now.

©NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

The edge of the D ring is seen at the centre of this image, showing a banded structure that has gradually became more finely spaced since it was first detected by Hubble in 1995

For nearly one and a half centuries, the cause of the most notorious fire in U.S. history has been a source of "heated" controversy. Some researchers suggest that a disintegrating comet ignited the blaze. But the electrical theorists say that evidence most often ignored offers the best clues.

"With the heat increased the wind, which came howling across the prairie, until at last there arose a perfect hurricane. Mighty flakes of fire, hot cinders, black, stifling smoke, were driven fiercely at the people, and amid the terrible excitement hundreds of them had their very clothes burned off their backs, as they stood there watching with tearful eyes the going down of so many houses". -- James Goodsell's History of the Great Chicago Fire, October 8, 9, and 10, Published 1871 by J.H. and C.M. Goodsell.

Last night we watched Super Comet - After the Impact, a Discovery Channel special that basically takes the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs and put into modern times. They added some cheesy drama, following the struggles of several individuals or groups, before, during, and after the impact, to show how people would react to such a global cataclysm. They used the same type of cometary body assumed to have caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, the same size, same impact location, and utilized all the computer modeling they have done on this past event to try to show what might happen (and to show what they think happened then). Not terribly creative and suggests that they really don't know all the effects of such an impact and are just putting things together from what little they have been able to figure out about that one impact, some (or much) of which may be just speculation, though I'm sure that there is some good science going on there.

This show highlights what we have already noted in this series of articles: the difference between the American School of Asteroid impacts that happen only at millions of years intervals and the British School which posits that showers of much smaller objects occur with great frequency in between those millions of years events.

The cheesiest part of this "docu-drama" was, of course, the depicted foibles of the humans experiencing the event. But, in a way, even those depictions were useful. The one guy who simply couldn't grasp the nature of the event, kept traveling "home" (which happened to be the site of the impact) even when it was clear that there was no home left. His emotions basically drove him to his own death.

Other people continued to act as if the world was still the same place and suffered thereby, though they learned to cope. What was clearly evident was that it was lack of knowledge about such events that was the chief problem for all of them.

During the course of the show, one of the experts made the remark "WHEN it happens," as though he - and the rest of them - knew for a fact that this was on the agenda for our near future. The very fact that so many scientists are working on these problems, including a large number of them studying the possible human reactions and behaviors and how to deal with masses of people, should warn us that there IS something they aren't telling the masses in the headlines of our daily newspapers, though certainly they are "testing" public reactions with shows such as Super Comet - After the Impact.

On my desk, before me, I have a book out of the more than 30 volumes and scores of papers on the topic of comet and asteroid impacts that I have collected in the course of this study. The title of this book is Hazards due to Comets and Asteroids edited by Tom Gehrels, with 120 contributing authors, published by the University of Arizona Press in 1994.

There is something in this book that I want to bring to your attention before we get on to our main catastrophe of the day: Mrs. O'Leary's Cometary Cow.

Samples of Comet Wild 2 suggest it is made of rocky material, like an asteroid, rather than the fluffy dust expected of a comet. The object may be a refugee that formed in the asteroid belt before getting kicked to the chilly fringes of the solar system, or it might have formed in that frigid realm from material thrown out of the inner solar system, scientists say.

©NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems

Comet Wild 2 is shown in close-up above. Beside it is a microscopic view of an EDM (electrical discharge machined) surface. Note the flat-floored depressions with steep scalloped walls and terracing. The small white spots on the comet can then be reasonably identified as the active cathode arcs that produce the cometary jets.