THAT YouTube “ISON Debris Hitting us NOW!” Video…

At first there were just a few, but there are now too many BS videos about Comet ISON to count. More appear every day, usually very badly edited and accompanied by godawfully pompous music, created by people who either genuinely know nothing about astronomy and are piecing together various news items to come up with what, to them, seems like a logical explanation – i.e. a particular earthquake, fireball or solar flare was caused by Comet ISON, or *do* know a little about astronomy (or think they do) but get their facts wrong and end up with a real dog’s dinner of a story.

Others are produced, it has to be said, by manipulative and mischevious people who know full well that they are talking absolute bullshit, but, for some perverse reason, want to scare people, and get a sick kick out of doing so. They scour the internet for images of Comet ISON and ‘process’ them in Photoshop or some other program to ‘bring out hidden detail’ such as UFOs, chunks of debris and asteroids – all of which are, of course, a direct threat to us.  Or they simply take the images and use them as they ar,e but label image processing artefacts already present on the images as UFOs, debris and asteroids, ignoring or pouring scorn on the official explanations of those things. It’s easy to imagine them sitting there, desperate to feed their own egos, gleefully watching their Views count go up and up as the naive and the easily led forward their ridiculous vids to their friends, spreading their rubbish through the internet like food poisoning at a wedding reception.

One of the most-viewed and most-forwarded videos on YouTube is one claiming to prove that debris from Comet ISON is hitting us NOW! I’m not going to put a link to it here, and give them further exposure, but this is the opening frame…

…which, of course, shows the smoke trail from a piece of Comet ISON debris left in the sky after it streaked across the heavens.

Rubbish.

I hate this video with a passion, I’ll admit it, not just because it is genuinely frightening people, but because it is just very, very lazy, and anyone who spends a few minutes, just a few, researching the science behind the claims would easily and quickly realise it’s utter nonsense.

To be fair, I think a lot of people are taking this video seriously because of a common misapprehension about the nature of asteroids and where they come from, the “asteroid belt”. Many people think that the asteroid belt is absolutely jam-packed with rocks, crowded in together, all jostling for position, colliding with and bouncing off each other. They think that flying into the asteroid belt would look like this…

And WHY do they think that? Two reasons. Firstly, because for years astronomy text books and websites have shown the asteroid belt like this…

…which does rather suggest that it’s a very scary place indeed, with hardly enough room to slip a piece of paper between the huge rocks! The other reason? The way asteroid belts are shown in science fiction films. They’re always shown as chaotic places where huge chunks of rock are spinning and tumbling around, past and into each other. Like this famous scene…

And actually there’s a third reason why people think of the asteroid belt as looking and being like that: a certain (brilliant!)  video game from the 1970s…

The truth is rather less dramatic, or dangerous.

You see, the asteroid belt is so huge, such a vast area of space, that it is mostly empty space. The distance between any two asteroids is typically between 2 and 5 MILLION kilometres. That means that you could stand on an asteroid and not be able to see even your nearest neighbour, let alone ANY of your neighbours, as anything other than a tiny, faint star, if that.

And if anyone reading this is thinking “Hmm, maybe, you might be right, I might be wrong, but I might be right…” and wants proof of that, here you go…

That’s an image of the asteroid Vesta, taken by the NASA spaceprobe “Dawn” as it flew towards it. If the asteroid belt was as packed with asteroids as the conspiracy theorists and sci fi film makers think, then there would be other asteroids visible in the picture too – Vesta’s neighbours. Where are they? Nowhere to be seen. That’s because even the closest is several million miles away. Dawn actually went into orbit around Vesta, and sent back increasingly gorgeous pictures, like these…

Again, note the lack of neighbouring asteroids in the background. That’s because, like the sheep seen through Father Dougal’s binoculars while they’re stuck in that caravan, they’re A LONG WAY AWAY…

So, hopefully now you can see for yourself this is why the claims that Comet ISON disturbed dozens of asteroids as it passed (or as one person on Twitter insists on describing it, ‘crashed’) through the asteroid belt, sending some on a collision course with Earth and dragging others behind it like tin cans tied to a newly wed couple’s car, are so ridiculous:  anything passing “through” the asteroid belt has very tiny odds of even SEEING a single asteroid, never mind deflecting or hitting one, or many. This is actually a pain in the neck for planetary scientists,who wish the asteroid belt was more DENSELY populated, because the incredible distances to and then between them means getting TO an asteroid to study it is amazingly hard, and takes enormous computing power and skill.

This picture, generated by my phone’s brilliant Sky Safari Plus astronomy app, shows why it’s absolute nonsense to suggest that anything coming off Comet ISON is hitting us…

See? Comet ISON is still halfway to Mars, that means it’s many, many millions of miles away (and is one reason why it’s still so ******* faint!!), and its tail is pointing away from the Sun and away from US, so anything coming off it will be travelling AWAY FROM EARTH, not TOWARDS it. And what the image doesn’t show because it’s just in 2D is that ISON’s orbit is inclined in relation to ours. That means its orbit takes it first beneath Earth’s orbital path, and then, after it has made its screeching hand brake turn around the Sun, far above it.

So everything in that video is wrong. When Comet ISON passed – not crashed – through the asteroid belt it didn’t hit anything, and it didn’t drag anything with it. And anyone who tries to tell you it did, on Twitter or YouTube, or on a blog, is either mistaken, or lying through their back teeth to scare you, or get you to part with your money so they can mislead and lie to and scare OTHER people.

Why am I so against these videos? They’re harmless, right? Well, no, they’re not. They might start off as a bit of a joke, a bit of a laugh, but the people who make them should realise – and I actually think some of them do realise, but make them anyway, which makes them wicked in my opinion – that many people are genuinely worried about Comet ISON and are “researching” it for themselves. When they do a Google search for ISON info, they find lots of scientific information, sure, but there’s a lot more of this conspiracy theory garbage out there, and searching YouTube for videos relating to Comet ISON brings up dozens of crank films reporting on how the comet is going to hit Earth, or shower us with flaming debris, or cause earthquakes, tidal waves or solar flares. My great concern is that some people who are ignorant about science will watch these films and actually believe them and be scared by them. And I can easily imagine some people becoming so scared, so convinced that there must be *something* in the clams about ISON being a threat to us that they do something to hurt themselves or their families, or even kill themselves in their panic?

Ridiculous? No. In 1997 38 people were convinced to commit suicide by the wide-eyed nutter leader of the Heaven’s Gate cult. I have a great and growing fear that such a thing might happen again. If it does, I hope the people who are creating these videos – the fake Pastors, Preachers and Professors, the EarthWatchers and the rest – are publicly shamed for their role in it, and are made to face up to their responsibility. They’ll whine that it wasn’t their fault, of course; they’ll say they were just “making people aware”, and giving an opinion, but that’s a cop out. Every time they post one of their videos these people know exactly what they’re doing, and are absolutely delighted at the prospect of terrifying people with their work. They love it. They get a kick out of it.

Some, of course, have other motives. Look closely at the bottom of their blogs and websites and you’ll find that some encourage their devoted viewers and followers to “support” their work by sending “donations”. Ahhhhh…. That should tell you a lot about what they’re doing it for: not to spread the truth, not to “make people aware”, but to boost their bank balances. They’re in it to make a buck.

Hopefully this blog post has reassured you if the “ISON Debris hitting us now!” YouTube video has scared you. If you’re the person who made it in the first place, shame on you for frightening people. If you’re someone who has passed it on to others, then shame on you too, for spreading the fear. And if you’re still unconvinced that it’s wrong, if you’re still thinking you know better than all the scientists and experts who design, launch and operate multi billion dollar spaceprobes covered with state of the art instruments, and if you refuse to believe the physics involved, and if you refuse to accept common sense and are still telling yourself “Well, they might be wrong, I’ll keep an open mind” then there’s nothing to be done for you, you’re a lost cause. I suggest you just go back to YouTube and watch more rubbish there, because you’re never going to accept the truth. I feel sorry for you, because you’re seeing ugliness where there is only beauty, and looking for lies where there are only facts, and you’re wasting an amazing opportunity to be a Part of and celebrate something special and rare – the appearance of a comet in our sky! But that’s your choice. I’ll waste no more time on you.

Everyone else – cross your fingers that ISON starts to brighten soon, and look at the other pages on my blog to find out where to see it and how to observe and photograph it. 🙂