ZetaTalk: Hale-Bopp

ZetaTalk dated August 17, 1995

Hale-Bopp was pronounced a comet when it does not, truly, meet the requirements for a comet. Do not the bureaucrats who assign numbers and name the celestial body after the finder check on these matters? No! They have a minimum requirement, three points, and if these line up into what can be computed as a reasonable orbit - all is well and all is accepted. What this means is that three people, working in collusion, can produce a fraud. In fact, since the proofs, the three points, can come from a single source, it only takes one person to produce a fraud. Without the 1993 image the recorded orbit of Hale-Bopp is so many pin-points on the head of a pin. They are all in the same place.

What about Hale-Bopp marks it as a comet? On appearance it is an exploding star - appearing suddenly and increasing rapidly in brightness, diffuse in appearance rather than with the coma expected of a comet, and having no tail to speak of. There are several irregularities that should have prevented Hale-Bopp from being labeled comet so breezily by the bureaucrats so cooperatively looking the other way.

First, where it has been noted that Hale-Bopp should have shown up on a 1991 image as well as the famous 1993 image, if it were a comet, this has been explained away as an outburst at the current time. Outbursts occur when comets fragment on nearing the Sun, being of a composition that cannot withstand the exposure.

Second, the outburst story stands directly at odds with the orbital computation, which places Hale-Bopp, so the story goes, in a regular orbit around the Sun every 4,000 years or so!

Third, the triangulation required is in fact not a triangulation at all, in the case of Hale-Bopp, as in truth only the current position and the falsified 1993 image are being used as the base. Are there not nightly movements in the placement of Hale-Bopp? As an exploding star increases in size and brightness, then dims and fades, the area where these points can be placed is relatively large and, in fact, at the current time, moving outward at the edges.

Fourth, no one is challenging how these points are determined. Are they the supposed comet's head? As no one has located a comet head in the diffuse brightness, those who position points across the face of Hale-Bopp have been given a free hand.

Pick the orbit you want, calculate back in time and alter a single image accordingly, pepper a few hundred points across the diffuse brightness of an exploding star - and voile, you have a comet!