By Nadia Drake
NANTES, France — During the 1300s, the Black Death was savaging Europe, England and France were locked in the Hundred Years’ War and Chaucer was penning his Canterbury Tales. Meanwhile, more than a billion kilometers away, a comet careened toward Saturn and disintegrated, dropping dusty clouds of debris on the giant planet’s iconic rings, creating rippled cometary footprints.
The ripples from that cataclysmic event can still be detected today, electrical engineer Essam Marouf reported October 4 during the joint meeting of the European Planetary Science Congress and the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences.