More problems for the ‘Oort comet cloud’
by Danny Faulkner
Comets are continually being lost through decay, collisions with planets, and ejections
from the solar system. If the solar system were billions of years old, then all
comets would have long ago ceased to exist if they were not continually being replaced.
Thus to sustain long-age thinking, a way is needed to ‘resupply’ the
solar system with comets from time to time.
For years, evolutionary astronomers have believed that long-period comets (those
with orbital periods of more than 200 years) come from the so-called ‘Oort
cloud’. The Oort cloud supposedly contains billions of comet nuclei orbiting
the sun thousands of times further from it than the Earth. Astronomers think that
the gravity of an occasional passing star or other object, or possibly a galactic
tide, causes comets from the Oort cloud to fall into the inner solar system. This
mechanism supposedly supplies the influx of comets needed to overcome the conclusion
that the solar system is young.
There are problems with the Oort cloud, the greatest being that there is absolutely
no evidence that it even exists!1
However, a recent study has revealed a new problem.2
Evolutionary theories of the origin of the solar system state that comet nuclei
came from material left over from the formation of the planets. According to the
theory, this icy material was sent out to the Oort cloud in the outer reaches of
the solar system by the gravity of the newly formed planets. All of the earlier
studies ignored collisions between the comet nuclei during this process.
This new study has considered these collisions and has found that most of the comets
would have been destroyed by the collisions. Thus, instead of having a combined
mass of perhaps 40 Earths, the Oort cloud should have at most the mass of about
a single Earth. It is doubtful that this is enough mass to account for the comets
that we see. The researchers postulate ‘escape valves’3 that could supply up to 3.5 Earth masses, but this
is still ‘low compared to recent estimates of the mass of the Oort cloud’.
They go on to ‘speculate that a distant source region for
Oort cloud comets’3 could resolve some other
problems [emphasis added].
Of course, if the solar system is much younger than most astronomers think, then
there is no need for the Oort comet cloud. Since it cannot be detected, the Oort
cloud is not a scientific concept. This is not bad science, but non-science masquerading
as science. The existence of comets is good evidence that the solar system is only
a few thousand years old, just as the recent-creation model suggests.4
Further reading
References
- Sagan, C. and Druyan, A., Comets, Random House, New York,
p. 201, 1985. Return to text.
- Stern, S.A. and Weissman, P.R., Rapid collisional evolution of
comets during the formation of the Oort cloud, Nature 409(6820):589–591,
2001. Return to text.
- Stern, Ref. 2, p. 591. Return to text.
- Faulkner, D.R.,
Comets and the age of the solar system, Journal of Creation 11(3):264–273,
1997. Return to text.
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