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Index to Creationist Claims,  edited by Mark Isaak,    Copyright © 2004
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Claim CE261:

Comets lose material as they near the sun. If the solar system were very old, comets would long ago have evaporated.

Source:

Velikovsky, Immanuel, 1955. Earth in Upheaval. New York: Pocket Books, pp. 261-262.

Response:

  1. The comets that entered the inner solar system a very long time ago indeed have evaporated. However, new comets enter the inner solar system from time to time. The Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt hold many comets deep in space, beyond the orbit of Neptune, where they do not evaporate. Occasionally, gravitational perturbations from other comets bump one of them into a highly elliptical orbit, which causes it to near the sun.

Links:

Matson, Dave E., 1994. How good are those young-earth arguments? http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/hovind/howgood-yea.html#proof3

Further Reading:

Jewitt, David, n.d. Kuiper Belt. http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/~jewitt/kb.html
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created 2000-9-30