Extrasolar Comet Cloud

Extrasolar Comet Cloud

TNRTB Archive – Retained for reference information

New measurements by astronomers provide yet another refutation of a recent prediction made by young-earth creationists that large distant reservoirs of comets do not orbit about the Sun or about any other neighboring star. In addition to recently finding evidence for such reservoirs orbiting about the Sun (the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud) a team of European and American astronomers now has confirmed that the distribution of dust and debris orbiting about the star, epsilon Eridani, matches the profile one would expect to be generated by a vast number of comet collisions. The team determined that the mass of colliding comets is between five and nine Earth masses and that the comets reside between about 3 and 10 billion miles from its star. This discovery that epsilon Eridani also possesses a large reservoir of distant comets confirms an important prediction of the old-earth creationist model while refuting the corresponding young-earth creationist prediction.