Here it is, the barbell-shaped Comet 67P as seen from the Rosetta probe this time last year. The amount of water discovered there locates the origin as the Kyper Belt or maybe the even more distant Oort Cloud. The question that needs to be answered is, how did it get here, in the Inner Solar System?
If it came from the Oort Cloud the possibility exists that it was kicked in our direction by the gravitational influence of Nemisis, a hypothetical brown dwarf star that might be a companion of our Sun.
Since no one has found Nemesis, it may not exist. If it doesn't then a rogue planet the size of Earth could have done the trick, or even events in the Alpha Centauri System which is next to ours.
Gee, Ceres (above) turned out to be disappointing. It's just a big ball with a couple of puzzling white spots. The asteroid is so big and round that it's been promoted to the status of Dwarf Planet.
This picture of Pluto shows Wright Mons, the largest volcano in the outer Solar System. The magma consisted mostly of molten water. Few craters are in evidence near the volcano indicating that the last big eruption must have been recent.
I'll end with this (above) picture of "light pillars" in Alaska. They appear when fog brings in a rain of tiny, flat ice chips. I almost didn't post this because fluky things like this always seem to be happening somewhere on the Earth these days, but, when you think about it, that's why flukes like this are worth noting...because they're so common.
The latest advances in photography and satellites are revealing just how common the uncommon events are. I don't know about you, but I can't think of thunderstorms now without imagining the red, jellyfish-shaped "sprites" that have recently been discovered above storm clouds. Weird events in the sky have presumably been happening for eons, but we just haven't been able to record them til now.
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