Piltdown Superman

Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS, so named because two observatories discovered it at almost the same time, dazzled the sky in late 2024. It has naturally prompted a great deal of discussion about orbits, eccentricities, and all that good stuff. Biblical creationists have pointed out that short-term comets would have ceased to exist if the solar system was billions of years old. Comets orbit, burn off some of their mass near the sun, repeat and fade. Also, some comets have collisions, get ejected from the solar system, and have their orbits changed, so those disappear as well. Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, NASA / Eric Bordelon (usage does not imply endorsement of site contents) Of course, secular scientists are committed to a universe that is billions of years old and the solar system of about 4.5 billion years. One rescuing device for the problem of comets is the Kuiper Belt out yonder around Pluto. That has been disappointing them. Also to the rescue is the Oort Cloud, a huge collection of rock...

We've been looking downward at evidence for a young Earth, now we can lift our eyes to the heavens. morgueFile/seriousfun Specifically, short-term comets. Most of us learned long ago that comets are wanderers in space that are rock and ice ("dirty snowballs"). When they get close enough to the sun, they begin to burn off some of their material and produce those dramatic tails. After enough loops through the solar system, they eventually burn away. Or crash into planets. Or get tossed out of the solar system entirely. Using evolutionary cosmologists' uniformitarian assumptions against them, we find that all of the comets should have been used up a long time ago. They have some interesting rescuing devices that do not hold together. A comet spends most of its time far from the sun in the deep freeze of space. But once each orbit a comet comes very close to the sun, allowing the sun’s heat to evaporate much of the comet’s ice and dislodge dust to form a bea...

Kohoutek 1974 (NASA) The existence of comets has long been used as an argument for a recent creation (probably the best treatment so far is that of Slusher ). The case is usually made as follows. The standard model of a comet is one in which all of the material observed is released by an icy nucleus only a few kilometres across. This model strongly suggests that comets are very fragile, losing much of their material during each close pass to the Sun. Most comets follow orbits that take them vast distances from the Sun. If a comet’s orbit takes it too far from the Sun, then the comet could easily be captured by the gravitational attraction of other stars and thus would be lost to the Solar System. This places a maximum distance from the Sun that a comet may orbit. If this maximum distance can be estimated, Kepler's third law of planetary motion can be used to deduce the greatest possible orbital period that a comet may possess (about 11 mil...