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[__ Science __ ] What 2024’s Bright Comet May Reveal About the Age of the Solar System
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Barbarian
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- Jun 5, 2003
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Whether or not one thinks the Oort cloud is ancient is beside the point. New comets are constantly forming from objects falling out of the Oort cloud (long period comets) or the Kuiper Belt (short period comets), and obviously have been for many millions of years.
Disruption of the Oort cloud by a close approach of a star would destabilize the belt, ejecting some of the bodies from the cloud and causing many others to fall toward the Sun, resulting in lots of collisions with larger objects in the solar system, including Earth.
What it almost certainly would not do, is remove all the objects from the Oort cloud. Hence, newly-observed long-term comets cannot be evidence for a young solar system.
Since the orbital period of Comet Tsuchinshan is about 80,000 years, and since it's perhelion with the sun would mark half the orbital period, it would have taken about 40,000 years to arrive near the sun in any case. Such a time period would rule out any YE timeline even if (as would be very unlikely) this was its first orbit since falling out of the Oort Cloud.
Disruption of the Oort cloud by a close approach of a star would destabilize the belt, ejecting some of the bodies from the cloud and causing many others to fall toward the Sun, resulting in lots of collisions with larger objects in the solar system, including Earth.
What it almost certainly would not do, is remove all the objects from the Oort cloud. Hence, newly-observed long-term comets cannot be evidence for a young solar system.
Since the orbital period of Comet Tsuchinshan is about 80,000 years, and since it's perhelion with the sun would mark half the orbital period, it would have taken about 40,000 years to arrive near the sun in any case. Such a time period would rule out any YE timeline even if (as would be very unlikely) this was its first orbit since falling out of the Oort Cloud.
