Churyumov meet Gerasimenko

Fig. 1 ‘Comet’ 67P twin nucleus, darker than charcoal. Courtesy ESA

The ESA Rosetta probe is currently orbiting close to 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, currently imagined to be a comet. “We’re a bit surprised at just how unreflective the comet’s surface is and how little evidence of exposed water-ice it shows,” said Alan Stern, Alice instrument principal investigator at SWRI. Planetary scientists still have the idea that comets are large balls of ice that have become coated with ‘dark stuff’ over 4.6 billion years.

Jupiter-Jet Asteroids

Cyclic catastrophism suggests that these bodies are actually the same as the main belt asteroids, in that they formed from a jet of hot gases that had been shooting out of the impact site on Jupiter for only the last six millennia, following the birth of proto-Venus. They jet obviously condensed first into small bodies, which eventually accreted into a larger body. The ‘head’ and ‘body’ illustrate the final stages of such accretion and the discovery of this body, which was not catalogued at the time, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/67P/Churyumov%E2%80%93Gerasimenko#cite_note-Kronk-22) was probably aided by the emission of gases due to the same collision since it was quite far from the Sun at that date and it is extremely black, as are most main belt asteroids..

The hyphenated name is merely a coincidence. These asteroids were launched in many directions as Jupiter spun rapidly, depending on the vector sum of the jet velocity, Jupiter’s spin and orbital velocities. As discussed in several previous posts, the most unique and previously undetected class of these same bodies are the Kreutz sungrazers, ejected into orbits which decay until they hit the Sun, 2,000 of which have been detected by SOHO and STEREO since 1995. These are the cause of all sunspots and amazingly all have the same inclination 144 degrees! Unbelievably, the standard model of planetary science is that sunspots are created by some unknown action of the magnetic field from inside the Sun.

These Jupiter-jet asteroids are unique in several ways: (a) because they formed from a stream of hot gases in a weightless environment they are porus, rigid and have a low density. 67P’s density is only 0.4 g/cm^3, less than one half that of water; (b) they are comprised of the same elemental abundance as Jupiter, but do not have the physical form, Methane Gas Hydrate (MGH), which requires extremely high pressure and low temperature, but still comprise the entire spectrum of heavy elements in proportion to their published (nucleogenesis) abundances, including iron; (c) because they condense, freeze and accrete while still within the magnetic field of Jupiter, they are permanently magnetized, as measured both by close passes to several main belt asteroids and evidenced also by the magnetic polarity of sunspots, in which the spectra of iron are present; (d) they have very low albedos, as has been noted for a few acknowledged main belt asteroids, the Kreutz sungrazers and 67P/C-G; (e) although water is a fundamental component, it is not present in a separate physical form, but is integral to the internal composition of the asteroids.

67P/C-G was originally found by Klim Churyumov, a Ukrainian astronomer whose team conducted a detailed study of the asteroid, which is published on the web. They went back through a sequence of older plates and discovered a number of changes in its orbit, attributed to the gravitational influences of Jupiter. They could not have even considered the notion that a collision of two bodies could have also influenced the orbit because the did not know the shape. The most interesting aspect of this study was the implication that the nucleus of the ‘comet’ is magnetized as suggested in cyclic catastrophism. This is something that ESA has not yet reported. Quoting Prof. Churyumov: “I think that this pecularity of magnetic fields in the plasma tail of comet 67P is tightly connected with the magnetic properties of the surface layers of the cometary nucleus. I hope that this problem will be successfully solved with the help of the device ROMAP installed on the ROSETTA Lander when it will land on the comet 67P nucleus.” It will be interesting to see how the ESA scientists try to explain a magnetic ‘ball of ice’.