Posted on 09/09/2006 8:45:54 PM PDT by Swordmaker
Not this crap again. I put up with your Mac stuff because you're a true believer, but this?
I love Don Scott's acronym for "dark matter", i.e. Fabricated Ad-hoc Inventions Repeatedly Invoked in Efforts to Defend Untenable Scientific Theories......
'fairiedust'
it should be just blam!
Crap? So how does a comet work? The "dirty snow ball" theory has been demonstrated to be untrue with every visit, fly-by, and modern scientific test. Are you seriously accepting that a comet, exuding "water vapor" can create a coma several times larger than the sun.
Walt Thornhill, on July 3, 2005, one day before the event, made 19 specific predictions about what would happen when the impactor from Deep Impact struck Comet Tempel 1... all of the contrary to accepted expectations. All 19 of them occurred, much to the surprise of orthodox cosmologists and cometary scientists. His predictions based on his theories were right... theirs were wrong. What does that say about their theories???
"Unusual predictions that succeed are the hallmark of a good theory. But, to this day, having a good theory considered fairly remains a huge problem if it calls into question prevailing dogma."
Read Reflections on the "Deep Impact" Anniversary Since the scientific dogma of comets cannot make accurate predictions, then it is time to dump it and look for something tht can.
"bright surface patches (camera saturation, most obvious in the case of Tempel 1)" Isn't this the same phenomenon Hoagland claims for the 'face on Mars' and a nearby 'pyramid'?
Not that I know of... but I don't follow Hoagland. If there were electrical discharge occuring in those locations, then it may be a similar phenomenom.
The camera saturation has been observed in several instances on comets and on some of the moons... in one, NASA, photoshopped the saturated pure white areas (that appear consistently on the peaks of ridges) and added the appearance of molten lava to explain the brightness that they could not explain in any other fashion.
I've been imagining that within 10 years we can have the technology & firepower to split a comet or asteriod if it comes within 2 million miles.
I will debunk point number 1. Coma several times the size of the sun would be visible anywhere in the solar system or outside for at least a thousand lightyears. Period.
This is pseudoscience. Its crap like this that propogates theories like the towers were blown up.
The problem with any directed energy weapon is that it always has to have more power at the projection end than at the target end... anything that can split an asteroid or comet will also have an equal and opposite reaction at the "gun" end. THis might be handled by a form of distribution of the input energy.
The other problem would be that the ability to "split" a comet or asteroid would be dependent on the makeup of the comet or asteroid... does the target have the capability to absorb the energy or would it reflect it? Would it distribute the energy or allow it to be concentrated in one "slice"?
Finally, even if we "split" an earth targetting asteroid/comet, the mass of the original is still there... even if we break it in to several pieces, the mass is still there. We would have to either divert the asteroid enough to miss or break it into pieces small enough that all would burn up in the atmosphere
Coma several times the size of the sun would be visible anywhere in the solar system or outside for at least a thousand lightyears. Period.The coma discussed above is in the ultraviolet, and the size discussed is apparent size, that is, observed from Earth (comet is nearby, Sun isn't as close).
Also, it's possible that the laser would heat the atmosphere of the Earth in a disastrous way. Used from orbit, however, it might be worth a try. My view is that the best way to deal with hazardous interlopers is to have some asteroid projectiles (either entirely natural, or processed out of harder materials found in space debris) parked in the libration points, and when needed, sent to head the interloper off at the pass, using a large ion engine. Nothing else we have now or will have is likely to be as effective.
Oh! Apparent size as observed from Earth! What distances are we talking? Couple million miles? Thats still a massive object that would be visible anywhere in the solar system.
Do you have any idea how blinding all those ultraviolet comets would be to Hubble? It sees in ultraviolet, visible light, and near-infrared.
Any of you guys ever heard of Occam's Razor? You ought to look it up.
Please provide your citation for this.
Here is one debunking your debunking:
Can a Comet be larger than the Sun?
Yes. Comet tails can easily extend 10s of millions of miles in length, and in some rare super-comets, over 100 million miles. The nuclear regions is perhaps only 10-50 kilometers across, but can produce a 'coma' larger than the diameter of the Sun. The above telescopic view of Comet Hale-Bopp in 1999 shows a coma size that is equal to the diameter of the Sun!
Recently the Ulysses space craft detected the tail plasma from Comet Hyakutake at a distance of 500 million miles! The above photo is of Comet Hale-Bopp taken at the ESA Southern Observatory. A portion of their Press Release follows:
The most recent image of Comet Hale-Bopp was obtained at ESO on June 18, 1999, with the SUSI2 instrument at the ESO 3.5-m New Technology Telescope (NTT) at La Silla. This observation was somewhat difficult, as the comet was very low in the sky at the beginning of the twilight. At that time, Comet Hale-Bopp was located in the southern constellation Dorado (The Goldfish).It was about 1295 million km (8.66 AU) distant from both the Earth and the Sun, i.e. at about as far away as planet Saturn. The photo shows that there was still a substantial cloud of dust -- a "coma" -- around the comet's icy nucleus, even at this very large distance.
This photo has been contrast-enhanced to show the truly enormous size of the comet's coma, over 3 arcmin across. The optical reflection from the bright star to the lower left was also enhanced by this process.
> At the distance of the comet, the part that is visible in this photo is no less than 1.1 million km across, or nearly 10 times larger than Saturn!
No other comets have ever been found to have such a large coma at this large distance [1]. There is now little structure in the coma and no "jets" are seen any more. Much of this coma consists of dust that was ejected from the nucleus when it was closer to the Sun. However, it is likely that dust is still lost from the nucleus into the coma, perhaps as a result of a continuing outflow of certain gases (in particular CO and CO2), albeit at a lower level than before.
The maximum extent of the coma observed around Hale-Bopp when it was near the Earth and the Sun in early 1997, was 2-3 million km, or only a few times more than now; the uncertainty arises from the different observational methods used. Comae of other comets rarely ever become larger than a few hundred thousand kilometres.
There is little doubt that the exceptional dimensions of the coma around Hale-Bopp is a direct consequence of its unusually large nucleus. Although it never became possible to measure its size accurately, a variety of observational methods points towards a diameter in the 40 - 70 km range. The nuclei of most other comets are at most a few km across. With its larger surface, more material is released -- this provides a natural explanation of the unusual coma of Hale-Bopp.
The fact that this comet STILL has an enormous coma at almost 9 AU from the Sun is also a problem for the accepted cosmology... or do you believe that an object on 40-70 KM has sufficient gravity to maintain an "atmosphere" over 1.1 million KM in diameter???
Comet Hyakutake, a larger comet than Hale-Bopp, was observed to have a Coma over 5,000,000 KM in diameter. The Sun's diameter is ~1.4 million KM... hmmmmm 3 times 1.4M km is 4.2M km.... yup, more than 3 times the size of the sun!
Sorry, Sunken, but the sizes are not "apparent" but actual. The Coma of a comet is much larger than the visual coma we can see from Earth.
Occam's Razor requires a set of facts from which to work... The problem is the "facts" the current comet theorist have been using have been shot down, one by one, by their own comet expeditions.
They predicted water vapor... no water vapor... in fact NO WATER! The found what may have been the OH radical but at less than 1% of the amount necessary to produce the comas and tails they expected.
They predicted sublimated cometary surfaces... gosh they found comets that looked indistinguishable from asteroids... complete with old cratering.
Their theory says that Comas and Tails are formed by the sublimation of ice and subsequent outgassing when the comet gets close enough for the sun to heat it to boiling... but Comets have developed tails and comas more than 3 times farther away than even the most optimistic distance for such sublimation to occur.
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