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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
