Comets
People have observed comets orbiting the sun for centuries. Comets are composed of antimatter that enters our solar system. The comet's nucleus range from less than 100 meters to ten kilometer in diameter. The solar wind and dust blast antimatter off the comet's surface creates the plasma coma and tails. Comets produce light from the matter and antimatter annihilations on the comet's surface, coma and tails as shown in the pictures
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Picture of Comet Hale-Bopp showing a blue plasma tail, by Peter Barvoets, April 1, 1997 |
The dusty-ice comet model was dispelled when spacecraft took pictures of Halley's Comet. The nucleus was blacker than coal except for where matter and antimatter annihilations were producing light and other radiation. After analyzing Borrelly's Comet, the nucleus was found to contain no trace of water. The water comes from the solar wind and dust.
During the last century, Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet broke into 21 fragments that collided with Jupiter and produced explosions equivalent to over 200 million Megatons of TNT. In 1908, a fragment from Encke's comet hit the earth's atmosphere in Russian Siberia and exploded of over 30 Megatons of TNT. On July 23, 2002, a team of researchers used NASA's Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) spacecraft to take pictures of a solar flares from a sungrazer comet that collided with the sun.