Comets and Stars

It has lately become clear that comets are not "dirty snowballs" as earlier believed, but rocky objects with no obvious source of water anywhere. This is odd because the tails of comets contain water. Where does that water come from if comets are rocks?

The answer to this may be that the water is synthesized electrically through fission. Hydrogen and oxygen atoms are ripped out of the rock so to speak, and combined to form water.

One indication that this is in fact what is happening is the abundance of Deuterium in the water coming off comets. Measurements made by the Rosetta spacecraft showed that Deuterium is three times as abundant in comet water as it is on Earth, and this is exactly what we should expect from synthetic water. Heavy elements contain an abundance of Neutrons. Fission of rock into Hydrogen would therefore have a tendency to produce the heavy Deuterium version of Hydrogen rather than plain Hydrogen.

But if it is the case that comets produce light elements through fission, could it not be the case that the exact same mechanism happens at a grand scale on stars. The electrical stress on comets is after all trivial compared to what must be happening near the surface of stars.

The fact that comets appear to be rocky objects capable of synthesizing lighter elements lends support to the idea that stars too are rocky objects, and that they too synthesize lighter elements. The reason stars appear to be made mainly of Hydrogen is not because they are made of Hydrogen but because Hydrogen is synthesized in great abundance right at their surface.

Comet

By Philipp Salzgeber - http://salzgeber.at/astro/pics/9703293.html, CC BY-SA 2.0 at, Link