Hans Christian Andersen (1807-1875) wrote a fascinating tale about a swan that was born in a pen and thought it was a duck. The other ducks looked down on this ugly brown bird and chased it away. One day, however, the Ugly Duckling saw some big white birds swimming in a pond. He expected them to expel him, but they didn’t. Then the bird looked into the water and saw the reflection of itself: it was not a duckling after all but a beautiful white bird like the others, a swan.
Most of the time comets are like the ugly duckling. The comet’s nucleus is a small, dirty rock, usually 1 to 10 kilometers in diameter, consisting of ice, gas, and dust. In some comets, this nucleus is surrounded by a huge cloud of hydrogen, which can be up to 3 million kilometers wide.
As the comet approaches the sun, a dramatic metamorphosis appears to take place: according to NASA’s comet website, heat from the sun “vaporizes part of the icy core or head and sunlight reflects off the vapor.” The solar wind pushes the vapor in an opposite direction.” from the Sun to form the comet’s tail. For this reason, comet tails generally point away from the Sun.”
Comets can be roughly divided into two categories: long-term comets, which orbit the sun in more than 200 years, and short-term comets, with an orbital period of 200 years or less. Some of them are so spectacular that they were thought to portend ruin. For example, in 1066, Halley’s Comet preceded the Battle of Hastings, in which William the Conqueror defeated the Saxon King Harold of England.
Many comets have elliptical paths that bring them very close to the sun. A comet loses much of its material every time it gets close to the sun. It has been estimated that a comet will lose all its mass in less than 100,000 years. This is a serious problem for the secular view of a 4.6 billion year old solar system. If the solar system were that old, we shouldn’t see any comets.
But this has not caused believers in millions of years to dismiss his theory. They have pinned their hopes on a hypothetical stretch of space called the Oort Cloud. They believe that this spherical “cloud,” which is supposed to extend up to three light-years from the sun, harbors millions of frozen rays that eventually find their way into an orbit that brings them closer to the sun to replace those that have been destroyed. The Oort Cloud is believed to provide long-term comets. The biggest problem with this explanation is that there is no observational evidence for the existence of this cloud. Creationist astronomer Dr. Danny Faulkner suggests that the whole Oort Cloud idea “is not bad science, but not science masquerading as science. The existence of comets is good evidence that the solar system is only a few thousand years old.” “. ” .
The Kuiper belt has been proposed as a potential reservoir for short-term comets. It extends from the orbit of Neptune (about 30 astronomical units, or AU) to about 50 AU from the sun. However, most of the objects in this area that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune are tens of times larger than comets. These so-called Trans Neptunian Objects (TNOs) include the recently discovered Eris (2003UB313) and Sedna (90377), which could be classified as dwarf planets. However, compared to comets, they are gigantic. To replenish the comet supply, there should be millions of them, but only 1026 TNOs have been found.
There is not enough material in either the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt to supply the solar system with the number of comets that old-Earth supporters desperately need. Genesis 1:14-19 records that the heavenly bodies we see in the night sky were created on Day Four. Genealogies in the Bible indicate that this occurred about 6,000 years ago.
The ugly ducklings of the solar system are not porte doom. The message they bring is completely different. Together with other celestial objects, “they announce the glory of God” (Ps. 19:1). They are startling evidence of a young solar system.