Cosmic Rain cover art

Cosmic Rain

The Controversial Discovery of Small Comets

Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Cosmic Rain

By: Louis A. Frank
Narrated by: Samuel Abbott
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £18.99

Buy Now for £18.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Every minute, several huge “snowballs” break up as they approach the Earth and deposit a large cloud of water vapor in Earth’s upper atmosphere. That’s the startling finding that world-renowned physicist Louis A. Frank came to after studying the images from the Dynamics Explorer 1 spacecraft. His conclusion, based on data acquired at the limits of detection, created a storm of controversy among scientists. This is the story that was told in The Big Splash, published in 1990. But, the story does not end there.

Less than a decade later, Frank’s discovery of these previously undetected small comets was confirmed when images were received from cameras aboard a different spacecraft named Polar. The news of this “vindication” of Frank’s provocative theory in 1997 made the front pages of several large metropolitan newspapers, including The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Washington Post.

Cosmic Rain, a greatly expanded edition of The Big Splash, tells this never-before-told follow-up, in Frank’s own words, of the confirmation of the existence of small comets and the harsh criticism he faced from colleagues for upsetting so many scientific applecarts in the process.

©2021 Suzanne Frank, Jessica Frank, Patrick Huyghe (P)2022 Abbott Audio, LLC
Astronomy Astronomy & Space Science Earth Sciences Science Interstellar

Listeners also enjoyed...

The Crowd & the Cosmos cover art
Worlds Without End cover art
Strange New Worlds cover art
The Little Book of Exoplanets cover art
The Cosmic Revolutionary's Handbook cover art
4th Rock from the Sun cover art
Astronomy: Explore the Truth About Universe, Galaxies, Dark Matter and the History of Astronomy cover art
All These Worlds Are Yours cover art
Galileo's New Universe cover art
The Flat Earth Revisited cover art
When the Earth Had Two Moons cover art
Is Einstein Still Right? cover art
One of Ten Billion Earths cover art
Fertility Technology cover art
Losing the Nobel Prize cover art
Human Universe cover art
No reviews yet