Comet Conundrums Resist Bluffing
Scientists may claim they are learning about the origin of the solar system, but the fine print shows them scratching their heads. This is apparent in a couple of discoveries about comets this week.
One Science Daily article is entitled, “Comets Throw Light On Solar System’s Beginnings.” Scientists at the UK’s national synchrotron lab in Oxfordshire had a chance to examine particles from Comet Wild-2 returned from the Stardust spacecraft. The unsuspecting reader would expect to see confirmation of a theory revealed in the body of the article, but the opposite is found:
Dr John Bridges, from the Space Research Centre, explains the results, ‘Comets are starting to look a lot more complicated than the old dusty iceball idea. For one thing Wild-2 contains material, like chromium oxides, from the hot inner Solar System – so how did that material get mixed in with a comet which has spent most of its life beyond Neptune? It suggests that there has been major mixing of material from inner and outer parts of the Solar System in its earliest stages.
X-ray signatures of iron oxides in the particles also suggested to the scientists that “there could have been small trickles of water that deposited these minerals.” The scientists suggested that impacts melting the ice on the comet might have produced these signatures, but no explanation was given how the comet got its mixture of cold and hot ingredients from vastly different parts of the solar system. If light is being thrown on the solar system’s beginnings, it hasn’t been reflected back yet.
Another Science Daily article trumpets, “Astronomers Discover Missing Link For Origin Of Comets.” What U of British Columbia scientist Brett Gladman found was a highly inclined object orbiting the sun at 35 AU with high eccentricity. Its inclination (104°) is beyond perpendicular to the plane of the planets, so its orbit is classified as retrograde. Gladman and his team tied this object in with theories about objects that formed in the theoretical Oort cloud as opposed to those that formed in the plane of the solar system. “This discovery may finally show how they transition from the Oort Cloud to become objects like Halley’s Comet,” he said. The article ended with his team trying to nail down the orbit to higher degrees of precision. It is not clear how such measurements lead to the ending sentence: “They will then begin unravelling the archaeological information trapped in the orbit of this highly exceptional member of the trans-Neptunian population.”
Good grief, you can’t do archaeology on orbits. What are they looking for, a clay tablet? Pottery? Archaeology is a science of intelligent design. These people want to steal ID concepts for secular, materialistic theories impossible to confirm by observation. It seems that evolutionary bravado has infected all branches of science these days. The people of fluff like to swagger and bluff, but connecting lab stuff to historical huff is tough – and as science, we rebuff, is not good enough. The observations without the stuffing will suffice.