Mahabharata Quiz - 76

 Click here for the previous question

Question: 76

Is there any scientific evidence of a comet-hit in the Mahabharata in 3136 BCE?

Answer:

Yes. On 19th August 2021, the NASA website published an article* that a comet that visited the solar system 5000 years ago, had broken up as it turned around the sun but managed to leave the solar system.   Its remnant was identified as comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4) when it first appeared at the beginning of 2020. Unexpectedly this comet disintegrated farther from the sun at more than 100 million miles defying the laws for such breaking up. A comet is likely to break-up near the sun when it is at perihelion but not at aphelion.

This made the scientists work on the path and the past of this comet, leading to the discovery that the parent comet had broken off near the sun, closer than the innermost planet, Mercury. For how it managed to escape, the article says, “One possibility is that streamers of ejected material may have spun up the comet so fast that centrifugal forces tore it apart. An alternative explanation is that it has so-called super-volatile ices that just blew the piece apart like an exploding aerial firework.” 

This gives a scenario of broken parts strewn around, some of them racing towards the earth and the moon and hitting them over a period of 13 days, with the bigger fragments falling on the 1st and the 9th day. This parent comet was seen by the earthlings, claims the article. Vyasa’s assertion “Dhūmaketur mahāghoraḥ puṣyam ākramya tiṣṭhati” (MB: 6.3.12) goes to prove that the people had seen the Comet and also seen it appear horrible on Puṣya day after which it was no longer visible. That is why he used the term ‘tiṣṭhati’. The visible comet turned invisible by the Puṣya day, though the initial broken pieces started descending on the earth from the day of Revati.

When I contacted Dr. Quanzhi Ye, the corresponding author of this research paper reported by the NASA website, he wrote that the parent comet did not cross the earth’s orbit and was at a distance of 0.63au from the earth.  From the Mahabharata description of the south- westerly wind on the first day of impact, it is deduced that the break-up must have happened at south – below the ecliptic plane – after crossing the sun, with the broken pieces strewn all over – and a group of such pieces racing towards the direction of the earth with more energy infused by the blast and the earth- moon system catching them within their gravity.

With the initial impact on the Revati day, the major impact had taken place on the 9th day when the moon was crossing Pushya, by which time the parent comet had become invisible.

The impact on the first day seemed to have occurred at Mohenjo-Daro, on the banks of the Sindhu River which we explained from Question 59 to Question 62  

*https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/comet-atlas-may-have-been-a-blast-from-the-past

Click here for the next question