Acksblog

In recent posts and comments I have cited the observation of mini-comets best observed in ultraviolet images taken by the NASA Polar satellite.  The principal scientist who discovered and champions these house-sized comets is Louis Frank, a professor at the University of Iowa.  I have several times cited his name incorrectly as Barney Frank, because the name is so familiar from politics.  For that I apologize.

Louis Frank has taken the brunt of much opposition from a number of scientists, primarily because the standard model of the solar system, which is purely uniformitarian in nature, cannot explain the presence of Frank’s estimated 30 ‘comets’ per minute.   I maintain that these are the source of the water found in the stratosphere, recently claimed to be influencing the temperature of the Earth by its greenhouse effect.  My cyclic or Biblical catastrophism predicts their presence, as an element of the formation of Venus 6000 years ago, which is still too hot to receive the water in liquid form, but will eventually form its oceans.  Because this water is spread throughout the inner solar system, the Earth and Moon sweep out a portion of it.

One establishment argument used against  Louis Frank’s comets, was that if they were impacting the Earth’s atmosphere, they would also be impacting the Moon, causing craters, flashes of light or detectable seismic events.  Guess what?  Astronomers, have been aware of random flashes of light from the lunar surface for decades, perhaps even centuries.  They are called Transient Lunar Phenomena.  Such flashes occur randomly and therefore are difficult to observe.  The figure above shows one that was captured on film.  Note that it is not very bright, in fact may not have been noticed at all if the impact was on the bright part of the Moon.

I believe Louis Frank erred in his notion that these bodies, with estimated dimensions of the order of 20 to 40 feet, are solid ice – the conventional (but incorrect) picture of a comet.  These bodies are most likely nebulous conglamorations of water which formed from vast amount of gaseous  water blasted into space from Jupiter by the impact out of which Venus was born.  Because of the lack of gravitational force in the weightlessness of interplanetary space, there would have been no force to compact these bodies to densities of 1.0 g/cm^3, the normal density of water.  They are more like the consistency of snowflakes.  This is why they do not create more visible phenomena in the atmosphere of the Earth and seismic or visible phenomena on the surface of the Moon.