Pith Number

pith:XM4AWBVX

pith:2024:XM4AWBVXFQ7KF56RHC7QGWQXFT

not attested not anchored not stored refs pending

The Large Smooth Patch on Comet 9P/Tempel 1: Remnant of a Recent Past Event

J. Kloos, J. L. Ortiz, J. L. Rizos, J. M. Sunshine, T. L. Farnham

A single gravitational flow event 600 to 1200 years ago formed the large smooth patch on comet 9P/Tempel 1 along with nearby terraces and other smooth units.

arxiv:2411.01997 v4 · 2024-11-04 · astro-ph.EP

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\usepackage{pith}
\pithnumber{XM4AWBVXFQ7KF56RHC7QGWQXFT}

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Record completeness

1 Bitcoin timestamp

2 Internet Archive

3 Author claim open · sign in to claim

4 Citations open

5 Replications open

✓ Portable graph bundle live · download bundle · merged state

The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Gravitational flow simulations demonstrate that a single event could have formed the large smooth patch, the secondary smooth units observed on other faces of the comet, and the topographic terrace features adjacent to the northern smooth unit. We estimate this event occurred between 600 and 1,200 years ago, a temporal window that notably coincides with a period of abrupt orbital changes caused by multiple close encounters with Jupiter.

C2weakest assumption

The assumption that the orbital changes from Jupiter encounters directly triggered the mass flow (rather than coincidence or an unrelated internal process) and that the simulations capture the actual flow mechanics without unstated parameters or post-hoc tuning; this premise enters in the chronology and triggering discussion after the simulation results are presented.

C3one line summary

A single mass flow event 600-1200 years ago formed the large smooth patch on comet 9P/Tempel 1, possibly triggered by Jupiter close encounters.

Formal links

2 machine-checked theorem links

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-06-03T01:05:43.100329Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

bb380b06b72c3ea2f7d138bf035a172cfb31e638097e587a7ec5b3691a278e73

Aliases

arxiv: 2411.01997 · arxiv_version: 2411.01997v4 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2411.01997 · pith_short_12: XM4AWBVXFQ7K · pith_short_16: XM4AWBVXFQ7KF56R · pith_short_8: XM4AWBVX

Agent API

Resolver JSON Graph JSON Events JSON Schema Signing key

Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/XM4AWBVXFQ7KF56RHC7QGWQXFT \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: bb380b06b72c3ea2f7d138bf035a172cfb31e638097e587a7ec5b3691a278e73

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "46c154412e21e2d14867e667bce2d664e2a3ddbdad796e1c39d504ac8bfa7bb6",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "astro-ph.EP",
    "submitted_at": "2024-11-04T11:33:34Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "009ee2e593cbf3166e442057dff92e6141771815ef7f61a7cc5ba3adb59d2319"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2411.01997",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 4
  }
}