The Bible According to Einstein's book of Comets
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318 The Bible According to Einstein
The fourteenth book of Planetology, called
Comets
Verily in the heavens and the Earth
are signs for those who do believe.
Chapter I: Origin
And the Sun shall have visitors
from the outer reaches of the solar system,
where, except for tiny spots of starlight,
darkness reigns.
And it shall come to pass that, at thousands
of astronomical units from the Sun, a ten-kilometer-sized body of ices, dust
and grit shall be knocked out of orbit and toward the Sun. And
several tens of thousands of years later, it shall pass by the planet Pluto. And
as it nears the Sun, the Sun shall warm its body. And frozen gases
shall evaporate releasing dust-particles and grains. And the gases shall
reflect Sun's light and glow. And this shall be a comet.
Chapter II: Structure
And luminous gas shall swell about its core. And
this shall be the coma of the comet. And solar radiation shall blow the
comet's dust. And the solar wind shall blow the comet's gas. And like
unto the blue flame of a blowtorch, a long whitish streak of glowing
dust and gas shall form. And this shall be
the tail of the comet.
And when the comet arcs around the
Sun and moves away from it, the tail shall not point toward the Sun -- the
tail shall point away. And to thee who hath not
knowledge, this shall seem strange, for the coma shall
be moving at its tail. But verily is this natural, for the tail shall
be blown by the Sun's wind -- the tail shall not be a trail of
dust exhaust. And when the comet ventures far enough away, the Sun
shall cease to heat the frozen gases. Then the comet shall
grow dark again.
Chapter III: Orbit, Size, Life and Death
Now some comets perturbed by the
gravity of Jupiter and Saturn or bumping with asteroid shall be
captured in the inner solar system. Moving in great ellipses, they shall
visit Sun every few years, few decades, or few
centuries. And these shall be the comets with short periods.
And those comets seen by thee
from Earth shall typically have a ten-kilometer-sized body, a coma
swelling to several thousand kilometers, and a tail often as long
as one-hundred-million kilometers in length. Now ye
who first sights the comet shall claim the comet and have
the comet named for thee. So the names of comets shall
be Tycho Brahe, Halley, Encke, Tuttle, Pons-Winnecke, Wolf,
Shoemaker-Levy, Whipple, Hale-Bopp and so on.
The New Testament 319
Now some comets, as they approach
the Sun, shall heat sufficiently to break up into
pieces. The destruction of such comets shall soon follow. Most
comets shall make a thousand solar visits before their final breakup. And
since every comet shall eventually breakup and disappear, comets
shall have lifetimes. But clouds of debris in the outer reaches
of the solar system shall from time to time supply new comets.
Now at any given moment, the number
of comets shall be more than a trillion. But their mass, when
all combined, shall total just a few times the Earth's mass. And they
shall visit the Sun so rarely or be so dim that few of
them be visible from Earth. And when they come, they
shall remain for several months and then be gone. And
in the night sky, ye on Earth shall see the biggest with tails stretching
a dozen moons in length. But small ones shall be seen by thee
only in a telescope. And the smallest shall pass by unseen.
Copyright ©1999 by Jupiter Scientific Publishing Company
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