was it the source of Noah's flood,
an icy muti-fragment comet?
"Beyond the orbits of Neptune and Pluto lie a large number of small, icy bodies, making up what is known as the Kuiper Belt (pronounced Ki-per). From 1992 onwards, astronomers began to discover large numbers of these bodies orbiting beyond Neptune, between 30-50 AU. This is the Kuiper Belt. At least 70,000 are known with diameters above 100 km. The vast majority, however, are between 10-50 km across, and so are very dim indeed." (from www.harmsy.freeuk.com/kuiper.html)
"Astronomer Gerard Kuiper suggested that some comet-like debris from the formation of the solar system should also be just beyond Neptune. In fact, he argued, it would be unusual not to find such a continuum of particles since this would imply the primordial solar system has a discrete "edge." This notion was reinforced by the realization that there is a separate population of comets, called the Jupiter family, that behave strikingly different than those coming from the far reaches of the Oort cloud. Besides orbiting the Sun in less than 20 years (as opposed to 200 million years for an Oort member), the comets are unique because their orbits lie near the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. In addition, all these comets go around the Sun in the same direction as the planets." (from http://www.solarviews.com/eng/kuiper.htm)
"The mechanism was described in 1984 by Julio Fernandez and Wing Ip. In a one-planet solar system, the outward scattering of comets by the planet would cause the planet to spiral in towards the sun. In the real solar system, the motions of the planets are inter-dependent, causing some to move outwards and others inwards. What connects the planets is the transfer of comets (and angular momentum) from one to the other. Neptune scatters comets out to the interstellar medium and inwards, where some meet Uranus and are scattered again. The process repeats down to the innermost big planet Jupiter. Fernandez and Ip showed that massive Jupiter anchors the flow of angular momentum caused by the ejection of comets. It spirals towards the sun but Saturn, Uranus and Neptune drift outwards. It is the outward migration of Neptune that has had (apparently) observable effects on the Kuiper Belt by trapping the Plutinos." (from http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/kb.html)
Object 1993 SC
"This image shows a small part of the discovery frames of 1993 SC, one of the brightest Kuiper-Belt objects so far discovered. It was taken using the 2.5 meter Isaac Newton Telescope on La Palma by Alan Fitzsimmons, Iwan Williams and Donal O'Ceallaigh on September 17, 1994. The two images are separated in time by 4.6 hours, and by comparing them it is clear that one of the objects has moved from upper left of center to a point where its image almost merges with that of a distant galaxy. This motion marks it as being a distant member of our solar system, further away than the planet Neptune." (from http://www.solarviews.com/eng/kuiper.htm)
