Over the past few decades,
astronomers had rethought their earlier postulations
regarding some of the objects in the outer solar system.
Pluto was still considered a planet, despite efforts by
astronomers to reclassify it, around the end of the
millennium. It’s eccentric orbit, size, and
composition led them to believe that it was actually a,
”captured cometary proto-planetoid,” aka....
“A big ice ball” that never really made it into
a regular planet. The same thoughts were prevalent about
its moon Charon, and also Neptune’s large moon
Triton, which was just one big question mark after
another. It had a retrograde orbit, and was over two
times as heavy as water. Evidence of large out-gassings
from beneath its icy surface was evident, especially in
the impact areas. All of these bodies had probably
arrived from far out in the Oort cloud. This cometary
swarm consisted of over a trillion pieces that had not
been swept up into the planets or the sun. Some of them
were smaller than a house, and some of them were as big
as a large moon. They were far beyond the orbit of Pluto,
and circled our sun in a complicated dance of orbits
within orbits.
These left over aggregations of the primordial matter
that built the solar system occasionally jostled each
other, and sometimes this was sufficient to send one of
them on the long inward plunge towards the tiny star that
we call the sun.
Nearly a light year out from the earth, the wave washed
into the outer edge of the massive cloud of debris. In
much the same way that a static air purifier polarizes
the suspended particles in your home, and deposits it on
a filter, the EMP did much the same thing to the loose
particles in the cloud. It rose so thickly from some of
the low gravity spheres that the charged particles began
to coalesce into larger and larger bodies quite rapidly. Fast by
astronomical standards anyway. It would not be too long
until those complicated orbits would be disrupted, and a
slow motion game of stellar billiards would begin again.
Soon, a comet, maybe several, would begin a frightening
game of, “chicken”, with the solar system.
Evidence that it had happened before was plain for all to
see, and it would happen in the future as well. The big
question was,would the new cue balls be ten miles across,
or the size of a small moon?
Totally unaware of the chaos in it’s wake, the wave
raced on.......
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