Astrophysicist: Bast’s 2012 Dark Comet Theory Possible
Up until today, as far as I am aware, I have been the only person to suggest a dark comet as the 2012 culprit. So to my surprise and delight I read this at the Daily Mail today:
Astrophysicist Professor Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who discovered pulsars, believes the most likely disaster that could pencil Doomsday into Friday’s diary is a black comet.
Such an end would match that of the dinosaurs who after walking the planet for about 165 million years – homo sapiens has been around for a mere 200,000 years – were killed off by a 10km asteroid or comet that slammed into the planet.
Professor Bell Burnell believes if the world as we know it is to end on December 21 it would have to be a dark comet that strikes.
Dark comets have little of the ice and snow that most comets have, and a lot more dust which makes it much more difficult to spot them as they speed through Space.
‘Comets normally are big, dusty snowballs. A dark comet has not much snow and a lot of dust. They are much harder to get a handle on,’ she said.
The collision itself, except for those near the point of impact, would be unlikely to be fatal to the world’s population but it would throw up so much dust into the atmosphere that billions of people could expect a slow death.
Huge quantities of dust would bring on an ‘eternal winter’ in which the sun would be obscured and crops around the world would fail, leading to mass famine.
I’m guessing that she came across my work at some stage and recalled it when the Daily Mail asked her about 2012. As someone who has been debunking 2012 theories I am mighty pleased that Professor Burnell has given mine her stamp of approval!
Of course, if the Mayans were predicting the return of a comet, it would be extremely unlikely (and almost impossible for them to achieve) that they were predicting an impact with Earth. More likely a large comet being visible in the sky (they would not have known that it could lose its luminosity).
UPDATE: A similar story ran in The Times, where it said:
Although she has spent the past year lecturing on why the world won’t end tomorrow, Professor Bell Burnell said that if forced to accept that it will, her concern would be “dark comets”.
