The Small Comets discovered by Louis Frank and John Sigwarth can easily explain Mercury’s Hollows as impact sites. The small comets, those big fluffy snowballs with a carbon mantle, could also account for Mercury’s graphite covered surface, the H2O in its exosphere, and the glacial water-ice in its craters. All the volatiles on Mercury’s surface are easily explained if small comets are continually delivering them. The small comets would be the easy answer to all these mysteries. Too bad our formalized peer-review process decreed Frank and Sigwarth were looking at instrument noise, not discovery.
Venus, Earth and Mars each have wildly different atmospheres from one another. Yet the mesospheric water budget for the three planets is almost identical, 2-3 ppm, with the mesospheric H2O present in extremely variable concentrations. How little we know. We have no reasonable atmospheric transport explanation for the water in those three mesospheres. Good thing we know Frank and Sigwarth’s Small Comets are just image-processing artifacts, otherwise we might think those three identical mesospheric water budgets were easily understood. BTW, where’d all the carbon come from for those carbon dioxide atmospheres on Venus and Mars?
The Moon
Where to begin? The entire lunar surface is emitting carbon ions. The SOFIA has imaged water on the sunlight side of the Moon. NASA says the SOFIA discovery is challenging to explain and difficult to understand. The Chinese discovered anorthositic impact glass spherules full of water. Their early estimates conclude there are at least hundreds of billions of tons of sequestered water in these impact spherules. Right now, they think the solar wind must have put the water in the spherules. Good thing they have never heard of the small comets. Don’t forget the recent discovery about the lunar surface changing much faster than we imagined. Oh, and the trillion tons of glacial ice in the moon’s craters is nowhere near as old as we first thought. All stuff we’ve learned in the last forty-eight months.
The Asteroids
The OSIRIS-REx mission dropped its asteroid retrieval capsule in Utah last September. Before we even opened it, water and carbon were detected on the outside. The asteroids are wet. The so-called mushballs observed in Jupiter’s atmosphere are difficult to explain, unless you cheat and use Frank and Sigwarth’s Small Comets. Everywhere we look we find our solar system drenched in water. Ultima Thule, aka, 486958 Arrokoth, (ironically snowman-shaped) the only Kyper-belt object we have ever visited is covered with water-ice, just like Pluto and Charon. The JWST is finding water everywhere it looks too. Water is in the light of the stars.
The Sun
For over one-hundred years we have been imaging water vapor in the sunspots. Small Comets must be the source of the water we see in them as there isn’t enough solar oxygen to account for H2O’s manufacture. Frank didn’t want to think about possibilities beyond the discovery for which he had experimental data. He wasn’t looking to make the Small Comet discovery orders of magnitude more difficult to believe; it was already pretty hard to accept. Good scientists like Frank and Sigwarth stick with the data. They hesitated to imagine that the small comets made it much inside the earth’s orbit. They probably underestimated their resilient carbon mantles. The Small Comets are impacting Venus, Mercury, and the Sun. Fifty thousand a second rain down on the Sun. The sunspots’ relatively cool temperature, around 3500°K, is where H2O molecules begin to dissociate, so we see it every time we look. Water’s molecular dissociation is the source of the little bit of oxygen we image in the Sun.
Dark Matter
But wait, there’s more. If there are as many Small Comets throughout the universe as there are in our solar system, then Frank and Sigwarth may have discovered dark matter. No one has ever seen a small comet; we only observe their debris. Dark matter has a simple explanation. Small Comets. They account for the dark matter in our solar system.
Frank and Sigwarth’s discovery is beyond momentous. It is as significant as the discovery of the heliocentric solar system. But who remembers their data? It’s been buried by peer-review. Our formal peer-review process will be best remembered for quashing discovery. Everyone who took Frank and Sigwarth’s data seriously could see the small comets’ debris fields (water vapor clouds). Penn State’s John Olivero and JPL’s Clayne Yeates found them when they looked. We need to look again. We will see them. We need to look at the data we have. The military has to be imaging them, they are anomalies, they only know they aren’t incoming missiles. What are the Chinese seeing?
The truth about the Small Comet discovery won’t be lost forever. But right now, almost no one remembers anything about Frank and Sigwarth’s discovery. There is one person at NASA who can change all that. NASA should push for further evidence and the recognition of the Small Comets. We are making these startling astronomic observations every day, and treading water because we don’t understand.