Comets—portents of doom or indicators of youth?

by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati

Comets have long fascinated (and often horrified) mankind. They seem to come from nowhere, and disappear just as suddenly. Their tails seem to dwarf other heavenly bodies.

Anatomy of a comet: Looking ‘inside’ a comet shows just how they are made up. A small icy core is the fuel for a massive and often spectacular ‘tail’ seen to flow from the head of a comet. Eventually, the nucleus will lose all its mass as it orbits the sun and ceases to exist. The short life of comets is testimony to the short age of the solar system and planets. Click for larger view

People viewed them as portents of disaster, and indeed a comet appeared about the time of the futile Jewish revolt against the Romans in AD 66, which ended in the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70; and before the Battle of Hastings in 1066.

Triumph of Biblical worldview over astrological superstition

However, instead of trying to tell fortunes from the heavenly bodies (astrology), we should gain information from their Creator, in His written Word, the Bible. It was the Biblical worldview which led to the science that explained comets. The Bible teaches that the universe was made by a God of order (1 Corinthians 14:33), who gave mankind dominion over creation (Genesis 1:26–28). Historians of science, regardless of their own religious faith, from Christians to atheists, acknowledge the vital importance of the Christian worldview in the rise of modern experimental science.

For instance, Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) formulated the laws of planetary motion. Kepler calculated a creation date of 3992 BC (even younger than the famous date of 4004 BC calculated by his contemporary, Archbishop James Ussher (1581–1656)). Then Isaac Newton (1643–1727), widely regarded as the greatest scientist of all time, developed the laws of motion, gravity and calculus. But he wrote more on Biblical history, and vigorously defended Ussher’s chronology.¹

Newton’s friend Edmond Halley (1656–1742) applied these laws to about 25 observed comets and showed that they followed predictable paths. In particular, he noticed that a comet he observed in 1682 followed an orbit very much like that of similar comets seen in 1531 and 1607. So he realized that it was really the same comet reappearing at intervals averaging 76 years. This was also the comet that appeared in 1066, AD 66, and also 12 BC, a few years before Christ was born.² When he successfully predicted that the comet would appear in a particular year (after his death), this was seen as a great triumph for Newton’s theories, and the comet was deservedly named after Halley.

 Relationship of planetary orbits and comet’s orbit. Note that the comet’s tail always points away from the sun.

Origin of comets

The Word of the Creator of the comets, which inspired the development of the science that demystified them, also tells us when He made them. In Genesis 1:14–19, He told us that He made the sun, moon and stars on Day 4 of Creation Week, which was about 4000 BC, as Kepler and Newton realized. Since the Hebrew word for star, כוכב (kokab) refers to any bright heavenly object, it presumably includes comets as well.

The features of comets make perfect sense in a Biblical timescale, but are a huge problem for evolution/billions of years. Because all age indicators work on assumptions, the argument here is not claimed as ‘proof’ of a ‘young’ solar system. Because of the reliable eye-witness account of the Creator in the Bible, the young age is accepted. And this article, among many others,³ shows that even under the evolutionists’ own assumptions, there are huge problems for their timescale.

What are comets?

Comets are ‘dirty snowballs’ (or ‘dirty icebergs’^4,5 that revolve around the sun in highly elliptical orbits They are usually a few km across, but Halley’s is about 10 km (6 miles). Hale-Bopp, seen in 1997, at about 40 km (25 miles) is one of the largest comets known. They contain dust and ‘ice’, which is not just frozen water but also frozen ammonia, methane and carbon dioxide.

How comets shine—problem for long-agers

When comets pass close to the sun, some of the ice evaporates, and forms a coma typically 10,000–100,000 km (rarely up to one million km) wide. Also, the solar wind (charged particles radiating from the sun) pushes a tail of ions (electrically charged atoms) directly away from the sun. Solar radiation pushes away dust particles to generate a second tail that curves gently away from the sun and backwards.

 This fascinating image was taken by the ESA Giotto mission in 1986, and shows the nucleus of the famous Halley’s Comet, which appears every 76 years. Ice and dust particles are seen here to be streaming from the surface of this odd-shaped object, currently estimated to be about 10 km across. The spacecraft Giotto was armoured with an impact dust shield consisting of a 1 mm thick aluminium plate and a 12 mm-thick kevlar sheet separated by a 25 mm gap. Fourteen seconds before its closest approach of 596 km, Giotto was hit by a ‘large’ particle of dust which caused a minor deviation in its angle and damaged several instruments including the camera, which ceased operating.

The coma and tails have a very low density—even the best vacuums produced in laboratories are denser. The Earth passed through a tail of Halley’s comet in 1910, and it was hardly noticeable. But comets reflect the sun’s light very strongly, which can make them very spectacular when they are close to both the sun and Earth. The appearance like a hairy star is responsible for the term ‘comet’, from the Greek word κομητης comētēs (long-haired) from κομα (coma) = hair.

This means that the comet is slowly being destroyed every time it comes close to the sun. In fact, many comets have been observed to become much dimmer in later passes. Even Halley’s comet was brighter in the past.⁶ Also, comets are in danger of being captured by planets, like Comet Shoemaker–Levy crashing into Jupiter in 1994, or else being ejected from the solar system. A direct hit on Earth is unlikely, but could be disastrous because of the comet’s huge kinetic (motion) energy. The problem for evolutionists is that given the observed rate of loss and maximum periods, comets could not have been orbiting the sun for the alleged billions of years.^7,8

Comet impact

Some evolutionists believe comets have caused mass extinctions. The mysterious aerial explosion in Tunguska, Siberia, in 1908, which flattened over 2,100 km² (800 sq. miles) of forest, has been attributed to a comet, but no people were killed because the area was unpopulated. However, more recently, some geologists proposed that it was caused by a large amount of underground gas being released into the air and exploding.¹

• Jones, N., Did blast from below destroy Tunguska? New Scientist 175(2359):14, 7 September 2002; Past blast—future date? Creation 25(1):8, 2002. Interestingly, ¹⁴C ‘dating’ of soil shows a future date!

Two groups of comets

Comets are divided into two groups: short-period (<200 years) comets, such as Halley’s (76 years); and long-period (>200 years) comets. But the comets from the two groups seem essentially the same in size and composition. Short-period ones normally orbit in the same direction as the planets (prograde) and in almost the same plane (ecliptic); long-period comets can orbit in almost any plane and in either direction. One exception is Halley’s, which has retrograde motion and a highly inclined orbit. Some astronomers suggest that it was once a long-period, and strong gravity from a planet dramatically shrunk its orbit, and thus the period. So long-period and Halley-type comets are grouped together and called ‘nearly isotropic comets’ (NICs).

The highest period of a stable orbit would be about four million years if the maximum possible aphelion (furthest distance of an orbiting satellite from the sun) were 50,000 AU.⁹ This is 20% of the distance to the nearest star, so there’s a fair chance other stars could release the comet from the sun’s grip.¹⁰

However, even with this long orbit, such a comet would still have made 1,200 trips around the sun if the solar system were 4.6 billion years old. However, it would have been extinguished long before. The problem is even worse with short-period comets.

Empty evolutionist explanations

The only solution for evolutionists is hypothetical sources to replenish the supply of comets:

Oort cloud

The best-known hypothetical source is the Oort cloud, after the Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort (1900–1992) who proposed it in 1950. This is allegedly a spherical cloud of comets extending as far as three lightyears from the sun. It is proposed as a source of long-period comets. Passing stars, gas clouds and galactic tides are supposed to be able to knock comets from the Oort cloud into orbits entering the inner solar system. But there are several problems:

• No observational support.¹¹ Therefore it’s doubtful that the Oort Cloud should be considered a scientific theory. It is really an ad hoc device to explain away the existence of long-period comets, given the dogma of billions of years.
• Collisions would have destroyed most comets: The classical Oort cloud is supposed to comprise comet nuclei left over from the evolutionary (nebular hypothesis) origin of the solar system, with a total mass of about 40 Earths. But a newer study showed that collisions would have destroyed most of these, leaving a combined mass of comets equivalent to only about one Earth, or at most 3.5 Earths with some doubtful assumptions.^12,13
• The ‘fading problem’: The models predict about 100 times more NICs than are actually observed. So evolutionary astronomers postulate an ‘arbitrary fading function’.¹⁴ A recent proposal is that the comets must disrupt before we get a chance to see them.¹⁵ It seems desperate to propose an unobserved source to keep comets supplied for the alleged billions of years, then make excuses for why this hypothetical source doesn’t feed in comets nearly as fast as it should.
• 

 There are many historical records of sightings of comets, which were often regarded as portents of disaster.  Perhaps the most famous is in the Bayeux Tapestry  about 70 m (230 ft) long and 0.5 m (20 inches) wide.  It depicts the events leading up to and including the Battle of Hastings on 14 October 1066, where the Duke of Normandy, William (the Conqueror), defeated the Saxon King, Harold. The tapestry was commissioned by Odo, Bishop of Bayeux and Earl of Kent, William’s maternal half-brother.  In one frame (above) there are the words, ‘Isti mirant stella’, Latin for ‘They wondered at a star’, and a stylized picture of what we now know was the AD 1066 appearance of Halley’s Comet.  At the time, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle stated, ‘… all over England there was seen in the sky such a sign as men had never seen before.’

Kuiper Belt

The Kuiper Belt is supposed to be a doughnut-shaped reservoir of comets at about 30–50 AU (beyond Neptune’s orbit), postulated as a source of short-period comets. It is named after Dutch astronomer Gerald Kuiper (1905–1973), sometimes considered the father of modern planetary science, who proposed it in 1951.

To remove the evolutionary dilemma, there must be billions of comet nuclei in the Kuiper Belt. But nowhere near this many have been found—only 651 as at January 2003.¹⁶ Furthermore, the Kuiper Belt Objects discovered so far are much larger than comets. While the diameter of the nucleus of a typical comet is around 10 km, the recently discovered KBOs are estimated to have diameters above 100 km. The largest so far discovered is ‘Quaoar’ (2002 LM60), with a diameter of 1,300 km (800 miles), which orbits the sun in an almost circular orbit¹⁷ [Ed. note: Sedna, discovered on 14 November 2003 and reported on 15 March 2004, after this article was written, is probably larger]. Note that a KBO with a diameter only 10 times that of a comet has about 1,000 times the mass. So in fact there has been no discovery of comets per se in the region of the hypothetical Kuiper Belt, so it so far is a non-answer.¹⁸ Therefore many astronomers refer to the bodies as Trans-Neptunian Objects, which objectively describes their position beyond Neptune without any assumptions that they are related to a comet source as Kuiper wanted.

Interstellar origin of comets

The idea that comets come from outside the solar system has been almost universally abandoned (see box).

Summary

Comets are not portents of doom, but are objects God created on Day 4. The successful prediction of comet appearances was an early triumph for modern science, inspired by a Biblical worldview. Comets lose so much mass every time they shine that they could not be billions of years old. Evolutionists propose various sources to replenish the comet supply, but there is no real observational evidence, and numerous unsolved theoretical difficulties. Therefore comets make much more sense under a Biblical timescale.

That. Is. Amazing. Main. Wow....

You just wrote the history of comet LOL

The earth and this universe is around 6,000 years old. We call it "young" although it's a really really loooong time. xD

It’s younger than what evolutionist believe!

Fascinating!  Thanks for sharing MF... will definitely use that one!!

The "evidence" is hypothetical. 

I like the subject Mainframe! 

Hey, you're back !!

FYI Update: Direct observational evidence of the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud now exists.  Subsequent to the date of the above article (2003), astronomers have now since confirmed the existence of Kuiper Belt objects and Oort Cloud objects by direct observation, so the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt can no longer be said to be hypothetical.

https://www.icr.org/article/comets-signs-of-youth

Articles like this are unfortunate, because people don't realize they're inaccurate and unreliable, and sadly, as a result they propogate misinformation and omit key facts.  For example, this 2020 article still quotes the Carl Sagan reference from 1985 about lack of direct observational evidence for the existence of the Oort Cloud, when not only is there substantial indirect evidence (even back in Sagan's time), but we now also have direct observational evidence of the Oort Cloud.  The article conveniently omits that fact. 

There has also been substantial indirect evidence that the Kuiper Belt exists, but for years this has been criticized by ICR for lack of *direct* observational evidence (even though indirect evidence is completely valid).  But now we also have *direct* observational evidence that the Kuiper Belt exists.  Not only that, it's exactly where scientists predicted it would be. 

So, now we have direct observational evidence of two regions--the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt--exactly where scientists predicted they would be that can supply cometary bodies.  But now even direct observation is not enough, because according to this article, yes, the Kuiper Belt now admittedly does exist but the objects that have been directly observed are too large to be comets (100 km compared to comets 10s of km in diameter).  But smaller sized objects can form from collisions and there undoubtedly are smaller sized objects but our telescopes can only detect the larger ones because of how far away they are.  Here, at least the article acknowledges these points but buries them in the paragraph so the reader comes away with the erroneous impression that the Kuiper Belt can't be a source of cometary material, when, of course, it can. 

More importantly, the article is disingenuous by failing to highlight the fact that the long touted primary criticisms of ICR--that there's no direct observational evidence of the Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt---have been proven wrong.  This gives the false impression that this young age argument based on comets is just as strong as when it was first touted.  But it's not.  ICR's main objections have been discredited. 

And that's just a couple problems in the article.  I don't have the time to go through all of them.  I'm sorry, I wish I could report better news on this, but the truth is comets just aren't a good argument for young ages.

NASA still says we haven't any observational evidence:

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/oort-cloud/overview/

You're correct, but this is an educational page (secondary source).  And it's a page that is very much in need of an accurate update, because our first directly observed object in the Oort Cloud dates all the way back to 2003 (almost 20 years ago), so the information on this page is way out of date and behind the times. 

The discovery made international news.  You might have heard of it.  It was named *Sedna* and it's distance is about twice as far away from the Sun as Pluto is (talk about cold!).  Pluto takes about 250 years to go around the Sun.  Sedna, by comparison, takes over 11,000 years.  

NASA is obviously understaffed and unable to maintain its admittedly enormous website.  In fact, I found a NASA web page (that is no longer maintained) from 2004 that is all about Sedna and that presents Sedna as the first observed object in the Oort Cloud.  Here's the link: https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2004/16mar_sedna

This is a good example of the importance of relying on primary sources whenever possible instead of secondary.  A lot has been published on Sedna.  Here's one of the earliest primary sources from 2004: "Discovery of a Candidate Inner Oort Cloud Planetoid":

 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1086/422095/meta 

It says "Page Updated: June 6, 2019".

Yes, it certainly does, which is why I said it's way out of date and behind the times.  In that respect, it makes the same type of mistake that ICR does, which continues to cite that outdated, 35-year old quote by Carl Sagan from 1985 about lack of "direct observational evidence,'' which is no longer true.  The fact that the web page was updated on June 6, 2019, does not change the fact that it still contains wrong facts.  Again, this is why we can't rely on web pages like that, which are secondary sources, but need to go directly to the primary sources--the actual peer-reviewed published scientific research--like the link I provided you above on the "Discovery of a Candidate Inner Oort Cloud Planetoid." (In fact, if you go to that article, you'll probably also see a list of related published scientific journal articles that discuss the many additional objects that have been discovered (particularly in the Kuiper Belt) since the first direct observational discoveries were made back in the early 2000s).

That source is interesting but presents it's findings as speculation and theory, not fact.  

Here is an interesting primary source piece... let me know what you think.

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.248.6316&rep=rep1&type=pdf

About Sedna?  The first line in the abstract is 

"We report the discovery of the minor planet (90377) Sedna, the most distant object ever seen in the solar system."  No speculation or theory involved in that.  Perhaps, you're referring to something else in the paper.  I simply gave you the link to show you that we do, in fact, have direct observational evidence for the Oort Cloud.  Are you claiming that they didn't actually see Sedna?

Primary source, yes, but from CRSQ, which is not a reputable or even recognized scientific journal.  More YEC/ID professional scientists are needed to publish in recognized peer-reviewed science journals.  There are a handful who do, but more are needed.

This article claims to make a scientific case, but a close read shows it's double-speak, and circular reasoning that already assumes what it's trying to prove.  The authors have to do this to publish in CRSQ.  Their results MUST agree with a young earth because they've already decided it must be so.  Anything to the contrary is automatically rejected and CRSQ would never publish anything contrary to a young earth anyway.  But "scientific" research to "prove" what you've already decided MUST be true is not real science and commits errors of circular reasoning, which the article chastises Big Bang proponents for purportedly doing.  Does that somehow make circular reasoning OK for YECs to use?

Such unscientific practices lead to all kinds of "ad-hockery," which is also evident in the article.  Like a worm hole the article says materialized near the earth to change the relativstic time scale to days for the earth (and giving an appearance of age of billions of years for the rest of the universe)---a worm hole that somehow just conveniently materializes to "solve" a time problem (while conveniently ignoring a host of other problems that such an event would create in the process)--and then the worm hole conveniently "evaporates" leaving no trace or evidence of the supposed event.  You can't get much more ad hoc than that. 

People seem to forget that just because made up scenarios might superficially appear to provide "solutions" that doesn't prove they actually occurred.  Yet somehow people always seem to mistake such for "proof."

I didn't have time to read the whole thing, but the opening few pages of the article are enough to tell us the source is unreliable as evidenced by ad hoc scenarios like "worm holes" materializing near the Earth and then disappearing that the article gives credence to.  

The fact the article also cites the RATE project (inaccurately) as demonstrable proof of a young earth, unfortunately, also immediately tells me that the authors aren't too familiar with the actual RATE conclusions and did not read it critically.  This diminishes their credibility as scientific investigators.