Short-Period Comets

This, as you will see, is really an argument for the youth of the solar system, but as it inevitably bears on the age of the Earth I have no hesitation in including it.

Fairly detailed accounts of the appearance of comets have been kept over the centuries, if only because many of them are so spectacular and people attached special significance to their appearance.  There are two types of comets known, those that come back every few years, called short-period comets, and those that appear once and then vanish for ever.  It is now appreciated that the short-period comets are rather like other members of the solar system, in that they orbit the sun.

The main difference between normal planets and comets, at least in their orbits, is that the paths of comet around the sun are never circular, or even approximately so, but are often immense elipses (crudely ovals), and are not uncommonly way off the plane of the ecliptic.  Their orbits may take them far, far out into space before they return to fling themselves closely around the sun again.  So how can these be used as a measure of the age of the solar system?

It was suspected for many years, and is now known to be generally true, that comets are masses of ice and rock, usually mostly ice.  The cold of deep space means that in the outer parts of their orbits they are just simply lumps of hard-frozen dirty ice.  It is believed that comets of this type were formed when the solar system itself was formed, or at least in collisions between heavenly bodies.  Some of these, such as the large, so-called ‘gas giants’ (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) contain very large quantities of ice.

As comets approach the sun the heat increasingly causes the ice to sublime (turn directly from solid to gas), and the water vapour then promptly turns to steam.  The resultant vast cloud of minute water droplets both glows in the light of the sun and is also blown away by the gases being thrown out of the sun itself.  This produces the immense and typical comet tail, stretching literally millions of miles in the case of the more notable comets, and always pointing away from the sun whatever the comet is doing.

Therefore a typical comet, every time it approaches the sun, will inexorably lose some of its mass, and even if, like Halley’s comet, it only visits once in several decades (56 years in Halley’s case), its life is inevitably limited.  Because of this it has been estimated that all known short period comets should have vanished within a period of about 10,000 years.  Indeed in the last appearance of Halley's comet in 1986 it was definitely showing its age.

Hence, the fact that we are still seeing short-period comets bears its own message.  It is a very strong indication that the solar system is itself quite young, an absolute outside maximum of 10 million years.  This does no favours to those who believe in an Evolutionary mechanism for life as we know it, and who require thousands of millions of years to support their convictions.  At the very least it indicates that the planets of the solar system have been extremely active in the (cosmologically) very recent past.  Neither of these explanations is acceptable to modern astronomers, who are driven, as always, by their more vociferous, evolutionarily-convinced brethren into espousing a huge age for the solar system.

Even if the solar system itself is very old some huge cosmic events must have taken place in the cosmologically very recent past, and this would have very seriously affected the Earth, almost certainly compromising any life on it.  Perhaps when God swept the Earth clean to begin our creation, he also created the comets we see now for the diversion of foolish minds.  Who knows?

Objections to this argument centre around guesses about what could be outside the solar system, but this does not materially affect the argument.  There are believed (please note the word) to be two types of comets: those from the Kuiper belt, the so-called Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), are short period and those from the Oort cloud (OCOs) are long period (>200 years before return) – both, it has to said being purely speculative.

A constant resupplying of the Solar System would require a truly massive number of both KBOs and OCOs, for which there is absolutely no evidence, coupled with a huge and continuing disturbing influence to throw them into the Solar System, again for which not only do we have absolutely no evidence whatsoever, but for which nobody has yet proposed a plausible mechanism.  The objections are therefore themselves purely speculative.