Deep Impact mission to Tempel 1 favours New Explosive Cosmogony of comets

Abstract

The assumption that short-period (SP) comets are fragments of massive icy envelopes of Ganymede-like bodies saturated by products of ice electrolysis that underwent global explosions provides a plausible explanation for all known manifestations of comets, including the jet character of outflows, the presence of ions in the vicinity of the nucleus, the bursts and splitting of cometary nuclei, etc. with solar radiation initiating burning of the products of electrolysis in the nucleus. As shown persuasively by numerical simulation carried out in hydrodynamic approximation, the shock wave initiated by the Deep Impact (DI) impactor in the cometary ice saturated originally by the electrolysis products 2H₂ + O₂ is capable of activating under certain conditions exothermal reactions (of the type O₂ + H₂ + organics → H₂O + CO + HCN + other products of incomplete burning of organics including its light and heavy pyrolyzed compounds, soot, etc.), which will slow down shock wave damping (forced detonation) and increase many times the energy release. As a result, the measured energetics of ejections and outflows from the crater have to exceed the DI energetics. Analysis of different clusters of the DI experiment data confirms these conclusions and expectations and thus it favours the planetary origin of comets.

Keywords:

• Collision physics
• Comets
• Composition
• Origin
• Tempel 1
• Detonation
• Electrolysis
• Ices

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to M.F. A'Hearn, M.J.S. Belton, D.E. Harker, K.J. Meech, M.J. Mumma and S. Sugita for providing reprints on the Deep Impact Project, to K.I. Churyumov for fruitful discussions, and to R. Horgan for drawing our attention to work by W.L. Mao and H. Mao on hydrogen clathrates.