Comets


Meteor

Best of the Web: Cosmic Propaganda Alert! Comet Elenin: Just Passing By - With SOTT Commentary

Jason Major
Universe Today
Thu, 09 Jun 2011 21:21 UTC
Earth Elenin
© J. Major
It starts out innocently enough: a small speck against a field of background stars, barely noticeable in the image data. But... it's a speck that wasn't there before. Subsequent images confirm its existence - there's something out there. Something bright, something large, and it's moving through our solar system very quickly. The faint blur indicates that it's a comet, an icy visitor from the outermost reaches of the solar system. And it's headed straight toward Earth.

Exhaustive calculations are run and re-run. Computer simulations are executed. All possibilities are taken into consideration, and yet there's no alternative to be found; our world will face a close encounter with a comet in mere months' time. Phone calls are made, a flurry of electronic messages fly between computer terminals across the world, consultations are held with top experts in the field. We are unprepared... what can we do? What does this mean for civilization as we know it? What will this speeding icy bullet from outer space do to our planet?

Comment: By all means read what NASA has to say about it. Then consider this...

NASA warns solar flares from 'huge space storm' will cause devastation
UK Daily Telegraph
Tuesday, 15 June 2010

Britain could face widespread power blackouts and be left without critical communication signals for long periods of time, after the earth is hit by a once-in-a-generation "space storm", Nasa has warned...

Senior space agency scientists believe the Earth will be hit with unprecedented levels of magnetic energy from solar flares after the Sun wakes "from a deep slumber" sometime around 2013.

In a new warning, Nasa said the super storm would hit like "a bolt of lightning" and could cause catastrophic consequences for the world's health, emergency services and national security unless precautions are taken. [...]
...and what McCanney wrote in Planet X, Comets and Earth Changes:
NASA is hiding data that would prove that there is another massive object inbound into the solar system with potential for devastating events for planet Earth. There is clear evidence that they fully intend to set the world's population up to be blindsided by this object. (McCanney, p.101)

The truth is that NASA, the NSA and other government agencies are prohibited by law from disclosing anything to the public that would cause a national panic. So too they will try to prevent dissemination of my theories about comets because it might cause a public to redirect its allegiance as a new and potentially dangerous comet comes into the solar system. While the government officials are using tax dollars to build safety caves for their "shadow government" in case of "major disaster", they are leaving the public out to dry with no forewarning or protection.
...before getting the real lowdown on Comet Elenin from these:

Comet Elenin is Coming!

Pole Shift in March? Not Likely!

Comet Elenin: Harbinger of What?

Comet Elenin Update!

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Sun

Another Comet Plunges Into Sun During Solar Storm


Space.com
Tue, 31 May 2011 17:21 UTC
Comet Plunges into Sun
© NASASoon after a huge solar storm erupted on May 20-21, 2011, a comet (bright streak at lower right) plunged into the sun. This shot is a still from a video taken by one of NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft.

A sun-watching spacecraft has recorded views of an ill-fated comet plunging into the sun just after a huge solar eruption - the second time in 10 days that a comet dive-bombed Earth's star during a solar storm.

Over May 20 and 21, the sun unleashed a big coronal mass ejection (CME), an immense burst of plasma that sent solar particles streaking into space at fantastic speeds. Shortly thereafter, a kamikaze comet barreled into the sun. And one of NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft caught it all on video, agency officials announced last week.

"Soon after [the eruption], as a bonus visual, a sun-grazing comet came streaking in (from the right) heading for the sun," NASA officials said in a May 27 statement. "Its tail could be seen elongating substantially as it approached the sun and apparently disintegrated."

This dramatic series of events followed closely on the heels of a similar spectacle less than two weeks earlier. Between May 10 and May 11, NASA's SOHO spacecraft spotted a different comet diving toward the sun, never to be seen again. A massive CME erupted at about the same time.

Comment: The mental gymnastics NASA scientists must undergo to really believe their own nonsense is breathtaking!

Are they just willfully ignorant? Or are they intentionally covering up the glaringly obvious truth that comets interact electrically with our Sun, causing it to discharge enormous amounts of energy in the form of solar flares, CMEs, etc.?

In his book Planet X, McCanney claims that NASA personnel are "prohibited from disclosing to the public anything that would cause a national panic" (p.83) Like the 'in the interest of national security' excuse cited in the War on Terror™, this excuse about 'not wanting to cause a national panic' is wearing a little thin. So thin, in fact, that it has become transparent and, thanks to researchers and real scientists like James McCanney, we can see straight through it.

Planet-X, Comets and Earth Changes by J.M. McCanney

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Meteor

Comet McNaught Caught Between Fireworks and Lightning


NASA.gov
Tue, 31 May 2011 14:04 UTC
Sometimes the sky itself is the best show in town. In January 2007, people from Perth, Australia gathered on a local beach to watch a sky light up with delights near and far. Nearby, fireworks exploded as part of Australia Day celebrations. On the far right, lightning from a thunderstorm flashed in the distance.

Image
© Antti Kemppainen
Near the image center, though, seen through clouds, was the most unusual sight of all: Comet McNaught. The photogenic comet was so bright that it even remained visible though the din of Earthly flashes. Comet McNaught has now returned to the outer Solar System and is now only visible with a large telescope. The above image is actually a three photograph panorama digitally processed to reduce red reflections from the exploding firework.
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Meteor

Stunning Video: Comet Collides With the Sun


Fox News
Fri, 13 May 2011 21:12 UTC
Now That's a close encounter.
Image
© NASA/SOHONASA captured a stunning video showing this fairly bright white comet as it dove towards the Sun -- and was never heard from again.

NASA's solar observatory captured a stunning video of a comet streaking towards the sun between Tuesday and Wednesday -- and the aftermath when it collided with the tremendous ball of plasma.

The video, captured by NASA's Solar & Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), appears to show a fireball jet out following the collision. That's not quite what happened, NASA explained. Instead, a coronal mass ejection coincidentally blasted out to the right just as the comet approaches and is vaporized by the sun.

The comet is probably part of the Kreutz family -- remnants of a single giant comet that broke up many centuries ago, and crash against its surface from time to time. It was discovered by amateur astronomer Sergey Shurpakov, the space agency said.

In this coronagraph, an opaque disk blocks the glare of the sun like an artificial eclipse, revealing faint objects that no Earth-bound telescope could possibly see. It's intended to allow scientists to view the faint structures in the sun's corona -- but it also reveals sungrazing comets like this one.
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Arrow Down

Bogus Science claims "Comet Theory Comes Crashing to Earth"

Rex Dalton
Miller-McCune
Sat, 14 May 2011 22:28 UTC

Comment: Most of what the reader will find in this article are misinformed opinions and ad hominem attacks directed at those scientists who have the gall to mention the reality of comet catastrophes. This is not entirely surprising given the attacks that other Catastrophists have endured in the past.

The interested reader may want to compare what's written here to the actual evidence amassed by Firestone, et al. described in this article:

The Younger Dryas Impact Event and the Cycles of Cosmic Catastrophes - Climate Scientists Awakening


Comet Impact
© NSF

An elegant archaeological theory, under fire for results that can't be replicated, may ultimately come undone.

It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America's first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis people and the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill. The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing the catastrophe were produced.

But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence was reported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made the case that the comet theory is "bogus." Researchers from multiple scientific fields are calling the theory one of the most misguided ideas in the history of modern archaeology, which begs for an independent review so an accurate record is reflected in the literature.

"It is an impossible scenario," says Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., where he taps the world's fastest computers for nuclear bomb experiments to study such impacts. His computations show the debris from such a comet couldn't cover the proposed impact field. In March, a "requiem" for the theory even was published by a group that included leading specialists from archaeology to botany.
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Question

Croatia: Gardeners Comet Tale


Croatian Times
Fri, 13 May 2011 12:32 UTC
Meteorite
© Europics.at

A Romanian man planting potatoes almost died when a meteorite believed to be from the tale of Halley's Comet thudded into the ground inches from where he was working.

Dumitru Zvanca, 58, said: "I heard a brief whoosh of air and then something hit the ground just to one side of me with an enormous thud. I didn't see a meteor, but I saw the small crater of earth it made and whatever had hit the ground had sunk into the earth.

"I thought there might be more so I ran inside and waited until the next day - then I went out and dug it up."

The gardener from Suharau commune, in Botosani country in northern Romania contacted geologist Sorin Grindei, from Botosani, who said: "It had fallen 50-70 centimetres into the garden. It was like a black round ball, like a pool ball.
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Attention

Comet and a CME


Space Weather
Thu, 12 May 2011 18:50 UTC
A comet dove into the sun on May 11th and seemed to trigger a massive eruption--emphasis on seemed. Watch the movie below, then scroll down for further discussion.



A comet goes in; a CME comes out. Coincidence? Probably, yes, the sequence was coincidental. The comet disintegrated as much as a million kilometers above the stellar surface. There's no known way that the wispy, vaporous remains of a relatively lightweight comet could cause a billion-ton cloud of hot plasma to fly away from the sun at 400 km/s (the observed speed of the CME). Moreover, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory photographed the eruption that did propel the CME into space. There's no comet in the field of view of this must-see movie.

Bonus: The bright comet pictured above had a dim companion. Can you find it?

Comment: Unfortunately, Space Weather's commentator does not take into account the idea that there is an electrical discharge phenomena taking place here which can easily explain why the eruption began before the physical arrival of the comet. If a comet in the far reaches of the solar system can induce Solar discharge events - which is part of the Electric Universe theory - then certainly, a discharge event can begin to manifest as the comet approaches.

From our recent review of Planet-X, Comets and Earth Changes by J.M. McCanney, we understand solar discharge events as follows:
Basically, electrons' movement is slightly retarded in the Sun's corona, with solar flares hurling out an excess number of protons. The excess protons in the solar wind creates a separation of charge throughout the entire solar system - a giant capacitor with a positively charged, doughnut-shaped nebular cloud of dust and gases stretching to the far reaches of the solar system, and the negatively charged the surface of the Sun. An electrical potential exists between these two poles and any object moving through plasma regions of varying charge density will become charged, depending on its size and relative velocity. When new bodies (e.g., comets) enter this plasma region from outer space, they ignite and begin to discharge the solar capacitor.
Given the electrical nature of the Sun and comets, there is likely more than just "coincidence" at play here.

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Info

A Cometary Case for Titan's Atmosphere

Jason Major
Universe Today
Mon, 09 May 2011 13:33 UTC
Titan's Atmosphere
© NASA / JPL / SSI and Caltech/UCLA.Ancient comets may have created Titan's nitrogen-rich atmosphere. This image is a combination of a color-composite of Titan made from raw Cassini data taken on October 12, 2010 and a recolored infrared image of the comet Siding Spring, taken by NASA’s WISE observatory on January 10, 2010. The background stars were also taken by the Cassini orbiter.

Titan is a fascinating world to planetary scientists. Although it's a moon of Saturn it boasts an opaque atmosphere ten times thicker than Earth's and a hydrologic cycle similar to our own - except with frigid liquid methane as the key component instead of water. Titan has even been called a living model of early Earth, even insofar as containing large amounts of nitrogen in its atmosphere much like our own. Scientists have wondered at the source of Titan's nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and now a team at the University of Tokyo has offered up an intriguing answer: it may have come from comets.

Traditional models have assumed that Titan's atmosphere was created by volcanic activity or the effect of solar UV radiation. But these rely on Titan having been much warmer in the past than it is now...a scenario that Cassini mission scientists don't think is the case.

New research suggests that comet impacts during a period called the Late Heavy Bombardment - a time nearly 4 billion years ago when collisions by large bodies such as comets and asteroids were occurring regularly among worlds in our solar system - may have generated Titan's nitrogen atmosphere. By firing lasers into ammonia-and-water-ice material similar to what would have been found on primordial Titan, researchers saw that nitrogen was a typical result. Over the millennia these impacts could have created enough nitrogen to cover the moon in a dense haze, forming the thick atmosphere we see today.
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Telescope

Comets gases may have led to Titan's atmosphere


Daily News & Analysis
Mon, 09 May 2011 10:27 UTC
Image
© UnknownSaturn's Moon Titan
A study has suggested that comets blasting gases out of its icy crust could have created the unique atmosphere of Saturn's moon Titan.

Several theories have come up earlier behind the origin of Titans nitrogen-rich air. Titan is the only moon in the solar system with much atmosphere.

Some theories suggest that volcanic activity might have belched it out, or sunlight may have broken up a primordial atmosphere's ammonia molecules. But these suggestions assume that the young Titan was a warm world, whereas measurements by the Cassini spacecraft imply that Titan has always been fairly cold.

The latest idea is that the atmosphere was created 3.9 billion years ago in a period known as the late heavy bombardment, when comets swarmed through the solar system.

"Huge amounts of cometary bodies would have collided with outer icy satellites, including Titan," New Scientist quoted Yasuhito Sekine of the University of Tokyo, Japan, as saying.

To mimic the effects of such high-speed impacts, Sekine and his colleagues fired projectiles into a mixture of ammonia and water ice similar to Titan's crust.

The impacts converted some of the ammonia into nitrogen gas, and Sekine's team calculated that ancient comet impacts could have liberated enough nitrogen to build Titan's atmosphere.

The study has been published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
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Info

Comet Elenin: Preview of a Coming Attraction


Physorg
Thu, 05 May 2011 12:32 UTC
Comet Elenin
© NASA/JPL-CaltechTrajectory of comet Elenin.

You may have heard the news: Comet Elenin is coming to the inner-solar system this fall. Comet Elenin (also known by its astronomical name C/2010 X1), was first detected on Dec. 10, 2010 by Leonid Elenin, an observer in Lyubertsy, Russia, who made the discovery "remotely" using the ISON-NM observatory near Mayhill, New Mexico. At the time of the discovery, the comet was about 647 million kilometers (401 million miles) from Earth. Over the past four-and-a-half months, the comet has - as comets do - closed the distance to Earth's vicinity as it makes its way closer to perihelion (its closest point to the sun). As of May 4, Elenin's distance is about 274 million kilometers (170 million miles).

"That is what happens with these long-period comets that come in from way outside our planetary system," said Don Yeomans of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "They make these long, majestic, speedy arcs through our solar system, and sometimes they put on a great show. But not Elenin. Right now that comet looks kind of wimpy."

How does a NASA scientist define cometary wimpiness?

"We're talking about how a comet looks as it safely flies past us," said Yeomans. "Some cometary visitors arriving from beyond the planetary region - like Hale-Bopp in 1997 -- have really lit up the night sky where you can see them easily with the naked eye as they safely transit the inner-solar system. But Elenin is trending toward the other end of the spectrum. You'll probably need a good pair of binoculars, clear skies, and a dark, secluded location to see it even on its brightest night."
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