Electric Comets & Asteroids
Of course, I spoke quite a bit about comets in the breaking news because of
Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. But this time, this is a more general look at
comets and asteroids and I may just say something about that comet again at the
end. Oops, hang on just a moment...
Phil Bland of Imperial College London writing of comets in The Times, said, The
composition of minerals is all over the place which tells us that the components
that built this comet weren't formed in one place at one time by one event.
Fundamentally, we still don't know how you make planets from a cloud of dust
and gas. Now there's an admission. Hopefully, the
Wild 2 samples will help us towards an answer. That comets are primordial, is the
firm belief and mantra of astronomers and planetary scientists. But the mineral
composition, appearance and confusion between comets and some asteroids should
have ended this belief decades ago. But there's another strange thing. That's our
collective irrational dread and awe of comets which is unexplained, given their
benign and often underwhelming appearance. Then, in 1950, came an answer
that made sense. Particularly to those who were prepared to think for
themselves. But unfortunately, it collided with the cherished beliefs of experts.
The answer came in 1950 with Immanuel Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision
where he wrote in his usual dramatic style, "When Mars clashed with Venus,
asteroids, meteorites, and gases were torn from [Venus's comet-like tail], and began a
semi-independent existence, some following the orbit of Mars, some other
paths. These swarms of meteorites for their gaseous appendages were newborn
comets; flying in bands and taking various shapes, they made an uncanny
impression. Those which followed Mars closely looked like a troop following
their leader. They also ran along different orbits, grew quickly from small
to giant size, and terrorized the peoples of Earth." Now, his outrageous predictions
based on a cometary Venus, were dismissed of course, and that's because his theory
was "incorrect". It's a strange thing to say about a theory, particularly when
it's been verified by predictions, successful predictions. And of course, now
we have meteorites from Mars arriving today. But those were the sense of
history. Now, you shouldn't stop someone from doing what's impossible on the
say-so of an expert. Velikovsky's scenario is declared to dissobey
Newton's laws. But astronomers work with no real historical sense. Newton admitted
he didn't understand gravity and Velikovsky threw down his challenge to
Newtonian theory clearly, in the opening pages of Worlds in Collision where he
invoked electromagnetism as playing a role in the celestial mechanism.
Unfortunately, it has taken more than half a century to produce an Electric Universe
hypothesis to modify Newton's law electrically and give a plausible
explanation of the more detailed events that led up to, and followed a recent
chaotic period in the solar system. Here we have the imaginary Oort cloud of
comets. This is where these icy objects are supposed to dwell. The astronomer, the
late Tom van Flandern gave some valuable perspective on the hypothetical Oort
cloud where the material for comets is supposed to be parked. The Oort cloud
averages about 1,000 times Pluto's orbit. You'll notice that the scale on this
diagram here is a log scale so it's not linear. If the Earth's orbit was the size
of a full-stop, the Oort cloud would be 6 meters distant. And the number of short
period comets is two orders of magnitude more than
the Oort cloud model would predict. The directions of approach to
the Sun cluster, sorry, cluster towards the direction of the sun's motion
through space. And that suggests an interstellar origin. But of course,
there's no known gravitational capture mechanism as I said the other day.
Anything approaching the Sun will accelerate to the Sun and swing around
it and then disappear again because there's nothing to reduce the energy, the
kinetic energy of that object. So, we're left with an imaginary Oort cloud of
comets and a Kuiper belt beyond Neptune. The Kuiper belt is easily understood in
the Electric Universe model, once you understand the electrical birth of stars
and the electrical capture mechanism of interstellar objects. The Oort shell,
through the ceaseless repetitive workings of the Gould effect, has become
widely regarded as a firmly established triumph of modern cometary theory when
in fact it is a piece of trash heralded as one of the cornerstones of
cometary science. So said astronomer Ray Lyttleton, and he was a well-known and
respected astronomer in England. He also said, "The remarkable properties of comets
are not even remotely explicable by any of the numerous ad hoc assumptions of
modern comet theory." But of course, nobody listened. So, we come to Stardust. The
grains from comet Wild 2 - were much larger than expected and made from the
same high-temperature minerals as found in the most abundant meteorites. This
discovery was so unexpected that an early sample was thought to be
contamination from the spacecraft. Like meteorites, CAIs, as they're called,
calcium aluminum inclusions, they are high-temperature refractory minerals found in
meteorites. They were found in Stardust. So here we have meteoritic, you know,
highly modified meteoritic material in the dust of a comet. But I'll talk
more about them in a moment. Is there any real difference between
asteroids and comets? Comets are supposed to be primordial objects, but
high-temperature minerals and clay... And that's interesting because, as I
mentioned in the news on the first evening, of Comet 67P, a geologists'
looking at the picture of, near the Lander leg, said he was looking at clay.
So here we have the Stardust mission where there was evidence of clay in the
stardust. Samples of Comet Wild 2 returned by the Stardust mission,
suggested it's made of rocky material like an asteroid, rather than fluffy dust
expected of a comet. One of the most remarkable particles found in the
Stardust collection is a particle named after the Inca sun-god Inti. Inti is a
collection of rock fragments that are all related in mineralogical isotopic
and chemical composition to rare components in meteorites called
Calcium Aluminum Inclusions, or CAIs for short. Can it be that that asteroid
and comet tails have more to do with plasma discharge and electrochemistry
near the Sun than with sublimating ices? The comet's low reflectivity was
unexpected for icy bodies. They have instead a dark, soot-like coating on
their icy surfaces. This is what we're told.
Could this blackening be due to arcing, rather than hydrocarbons. If so, this
could invalidate the hypothesis that the hydroxyl iron detected in comet comas is
due to the ultraviolet photo dissociation of water molecules. Now, photo dissociation
of water produces positive ions. So, an unexplained 100-fold abundance of
negative ions close to comet Halley's nucleus, suggests cathode
sputtering of surface minerals. They come off with electrons attached. And of
course, the very fact that there were negative ions of oxygen, means that the
minerals on the surface of comet Halley contained oxygen. As I say, the oxygen
combines with solar wind protons in the coma to produce the OH and ions
of water molecules. Recently, asteroid 3200 Phaeton's dust tail, which I'll
discuss later, is also explained by arc sputtering which doesn't require any
explosive release of gas. Because the problem is an asteroid is supposed to be a
rock and here to develop the tail going around the Sun. OK. Meteorites. And
these, of course, are very important. If we're receiving meteorites from Mars,
then we need to look very closely at them to see what sort of things have
happened to those tiny rocks in the process of leaving Mars. So they're
supposed to be pieces of comets or asteroids and they're supposed to date
the birth of the solar system. However, most contain millimeter-sized spheroids
called 'chondrules' -- they're sort of little glassy drops described as drops of fiery
rain. Now, chondritic meteorites also have the calcium-aluminium rich inclusions
that show plasma oven effects which I'll discuss further. The wealthy English
gentleman, Henry Clifton Sorby, in the 1800's, pioneered the use of high-powered
microscopes to examine thin sections of rock. When he applied the method to a
chondrite, he exclaimed that they contained droplets of a fiery rain. The
high temperature required to melt the chondrules prompted Sorby to propose
that they came from the sun, ejected in solar flares. Of course, his idea is
treated today as quaint nonsense although a little progress has been made
since. However, it is worth noting that solar coronal mass ejections or
CMEs do show the power of an electric discharge to hurl billions of tons of
matter into space at colossal speed against the strongest gravitational tug
in the solar system. So we may have been closer to the truth than anyone will
credit. Chondritic meteorites are composed of
three seemingly incompatible types of rock. Low-temperature, hydrated and carbon
bearing minerals around 200 degrees K. Flash melted chondrules around 2000 K.
And refractory calcium aluminum inclusions, sorry, used the american term.
CAIs. And there are also elemental and isotopic anomalies. Now, scientists have
looked at lightning as a possible cause for these high temperature drops of
fiery rain. But even on Earth, the cause of lightning remains a mystery. So that
has sort of been put to one side because nobody can explain the lightning.
Significantly, it seems that comet Wild 2 has been exposed to lightning in
space. Back in 1988, I wrote a paper. It was published in the SIS journal, about
chondritic meteorites. There is no conventional theory of meteorite origins
that can account for the 17 odd features of chondritic meteorites that are identified
in this paper. The electric discharge hypothesis appears to offer for the
first time the possibility of an explanation for all of the peculiar
features of chondrites, all 17 of them. By extension, it offers a more plausible
mechanism for the creation of asteroids, comets, moons, planetary rings and
companion stars, than does the Nebula Hypothesis. That was, I wrote it back in 1988.
But I wasn't the first one to think about electric comets. It's clear that at
least by the second half of the 19th century, many scientists believed that
comet tails were fundamentally electric. For example, in August 1882, in the
English Mechanic and World of Science, it wrote of comet tails, "...There seems to be a
rapidly growing feeling amongst physicists that both the self-light of
comets and the phenomena of their tails belong to the order of electrical
phenomena." The dirty ice ball model of comets was
discredited with the first flyby of a comet, Comet Halley. Since then, the
contrary evidence is kept on piling up as seen here. Small rocks with a coma
larger than the Sun. They have unexpected fine dust jets, some on the dark side.
They have a nucleus blacker than copier toner. A complex cratered surface. They
exhibit layering. High temperature minerals. They've been seen to emit
X-rays, most unexpectedly. And they explode for no known reason. This is an
artist's image. It's rather telling because it looks nothing like the high
velocity beams coming from comet Hartley and also that we've seen coming from
Comet 67P. And the explanation for this on comet Hartley was, "When heat from the
Sun reaches a pocket of dry ice, it instantly transforms from solid to vapor
forming a jet wherever local topography happens to collimate the outrushing gas.
Apparently, these carbon monoxide jets are carrying chunks of snowy water or
ice along for the ride." But there's no reason to expect gas rising
from beneath the comet's surface, as the consensus model holds, to form a fine jet
or to rise perpendicularly as we've seen in all subsequent comet nucleus
close-ups. This is comet Wild 2 - and it shows here, similar surface etching to
that of an electrical discharge machined surface which is at the bottom here. You
see in particular this footprint, rather, it was originally called, these were
footprints. But you see how closely it matches this terraced flat floor
depression in an electrically discharged, machined piece of metal.
"It is not clear why sublimation process, driven by solar illumination on a
spinning body, would form globally distributed circular structures.
Unresolved bright spots seem to be connected with the jets from the nucleus.
The mass loss seems to occur mostly from the edges of the scarps
and this is typical of electrical discharge machining. That's how it forms
those terraces and so on. And the albedo of the eroded surface does not seem to
change. That is, there's no buried ice. And it does seem therefore that the arc
itself is what's causing the blackening. Any bright spots will be unresolved
because cathode spots due to spark erosion, can carry about a million amps
per square centimeter or more. So the luminosity of a cathode spot can be a
secondary effect when the spot becomes incandescent which is unlikely on a
rocky comet, or emits vapor which we do see. Or has a glowing halo of St. Elmo's
fire. So it may be that the images with a great contrast range are necessary to
see details of this effect. And it has to be close-up to, very close. In any case,
the white spots seen are unlikely to be due to differences in surface albedo and
I expect them to be featureless, not a bright piece of rock surface. Spires on
Comets "Comet Wild 2 shows numerous strange pinnacles as long as 100 meters."
That's a quote from the report in Science. The pinnacles are unexpected.
Close-ups of other comets and asteroids show no such features. We've now
have seen another one with Comet 67P. Other unusual features include long
cliffs, deep pits and craters. All of these features are hypothesized to be
indicative of a very rigid surface sculpted by impacts and explosive
sublimation. Initially, Wild 2 was expected by many
to be held together only quite loosely. Where have we heard that before? The
comparison of Wild 2 spires with Monument Valley is
ironic, given that the entire southwest of the USA is regarded as a fine example
of electric discharge machining territory by Electric Universe
aficionados. Here we have, at the bottom, some of the pictures from the Rosetta
mission and I've acknowledged Ignacio Cisneros here because he's been
doing a great job in looking in detail at these images and passing them on to
me. There is, there are many more pictures that I could show but it would have
taken up the whole 45 minutes. Let's get to the electrical nature of comets and
comet impact with comet Shoemaker-Levy 9's encounter with Jupiter. Eugene
Shoemaker said there's a chance we will see very little. Well, we saw a whole lot,
it actually overloaded some of the infrared telescopes on Earth. The dazzling display
baffled astronomers. They were cosmic lightning flashes high above Jupiter's
atmosphere. No water was detected and that's important. Afterwards, we had these
dark fallout rings and a black spot usually somewhere near the center or
off-center. But sometime before Tommy Gold had suggested an electric arc was
responsible for a similar ring pattern on Jupiter's moon Io. Now Healy and Tony
Peratt explained them in an article in Science
in terms of a plasma gun. Now the Shoemaker Levy 9 impacts showed the same
pattern on Jupiter. So the fragments of Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were destroyed by
Jupiter's thunderbolt. In other words, instead of that being a comet burying
itself into the atmosphere and then getting a rebound,
throwing material back up again, which is why they expected to see water from
lower down in the atmosphere, Jupiter itself has unleashed a lightning bolt
from its ionosphere which has destroyed the incoming comet and the debris from
it it has fallen in a ring which is typical of a plasma gun effect. There is
no other explanation for these neat rings and material falling on a surface
from a jet. We come to Deep Impact. This spectacular image of comet Tempel 1
was taken 67 seconds after impact. The scattered light from
the event saturated the camera's detector. A split-second before impact there was a
flash of light predicted, by me, nearly four years earlier. This spectacular
image of comet Tempel 1, oh sorry... ...beg your pardon... The test of a
new hypothesis is successful prediction. The more unexpected, the better. Using the
electrical model of cometary activity I predicted, four years in advance on my
website when announced, that the Deep Impact
mission to comet Tempel 1 would produce two flashes; a small flash before impact
as the nucleus discharged to the projectile rather like the spark
sometimes as you reach for a metal doorknob. Amongst other things I also
predicted an unexpectedly energetic flash to follow the impact. I wrote, "The
energetic effects of the encounter should exceed that of a simple physical
impact in the same way that was seen with comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 at Jupiter.
So there was already a precedent. And this seems to be lost on cometary
scientists because many of these things they could have known in advance for the
comet 67P adventure. After the event, NASA expert Peter Schultz suggested that the
initial flash indicates a layered structure for the comet. "My guess is, there
were soft layering on top, the impact that went down and finally got in
contact with ices." Where have we heard this before? This ad-hoc hypothesis of
unbelievably fragile outer layers is now treated as an observational fact.
A confirmation in the words of Deep Impact investigator Michael Ahern,
"Notably however, the impact released very little water." Deep Impact. The, when Tempel 1
was revisited by the Stardust spacecraft on February the 15th, 2011, the
expected crater showed no sign of deep penetration. The crater was
almost indiscernible as if the impactor had hit solid rock or partially
vaporized before or on impact. Once again, the ad hoc explanations were
weak. And I quote, "Stuff went up and came down... and the crater partly healed itself."
One wants to know how. But a hard surface might have been anticipated both from
the comet's appearance and much earlier evidence from radar returns from comet
Encke that implied a non-porous, probably rock, surface material. How much
contrary evidence do you need? The puzzling erosion of an escarpment on
comet Tempel 1 is simply explained by the tendency of cathode spark machining
to initiate it on a sharp edge and electrically etch or sputter extremely
fine material progressively back from that edge. The extreme fineness of comet
dust was first remarked upon following the encounters with comet Halley because
it was not expected of interstellar dust grains.
I suggest that the unexplained white spots which have observed to favor such
locations, are active cathode arcs. And there was plenty of prior evidence for
this suggestion. Here we see arc erosion on Io, Jupiter's moon Io, which
is a great laboratory to look at electrical effects on a solid surface.
It shows the electrical etching effect and its spectacular jets emanating from
hot spots along crater walls. The flat crater floor is darkened or burned where
the electrical etching is recent. Supporting a cathode discharge model are
the unusual parabolic filamentary plumes and termination of the penumbra on a
narrow ring, unlike any volcano. These are all diagnostic of a plasma gun
effect. The breakdown field strength for lightning on Io is 1/10 that on Earth.
Notably, based on his electric arc interpretation of Io's outburst,
professor Tommy Gold predicted in 1979, "Luminous spots in the caldera may be
visible at night." As you can see on the right, his unusual
prediction was confirmed. That necklace of bright spots there, are cathode arcs
operating along the edge of the caldera, so-called. We found layering on comets.
This one is comet Tempel 1 again. Each layer is 3 to 10 meters thick and the
one kilometer depression strangely sublimated away. Sublimated! The heavily
pitted and cratered region was discovered on comet Tempel 1 as well. The
spacecraft, as it flew past, detected impacts. And they said, "We were stunned. It
was like flying through flak... just bursts... in less than a tenth of a second." This
gives you some idea of the narrowness of those jets. They're highly, high
collimation of those jets and it's not the kind of thing you'd expect from
material blasting out of a fissure which should be more widely dispersed. But you
see the description there, "This is the way comets act... they send our clods of
earth and ice that come apart." This was their only explanation for such short
bursts. Comet Hartley 2 and its snowstorm. On
November 18, 2010, Deep Impact photographed an unexpected tempest when
it flew past the comet's nucleus on November the 4th at a distance of only
700 kilometers. At first, researchers only noticed the comet's hyperactive jets
flamboyantly spewing carbon dioxide from dozens of sites. A closer look revealed
an even greater marvel. The space around the comet's core is glistening with
chunks of ice and snow, some of them possibly as large as a
basketball. The very same high-resolution high dynamic range cameras that recorded
snow chunks swirling around Hartley 2, did not detect anything similar around
Tempel 1. This is a genuinely new phenomenon says Science team member
Jessica Sunshine. Comet Hartley 2 is not like the other comets we visited. This
may have been an unusual electrical outburst based on the tiny ice grain
evidence. This is the thing. Cathode jet will remove the material in very fine
particles. At comet Halley, they were surprised how fine the dust was. I'll
just catch up to... So it may have been an unusual electrical outburst from
my point of view, based on that tiny ice grain evidence. But it emphasizes that
each comet has a unique origin and history. So that it may incorporate more
or less water and volatiles from its parent bodies' atmosphere and surface
material. The Electric Universe model has never denied this. The message is that
the visual evidence must be treated as if on Earth. If the comet looks rough and
rocky, then it's safe to say it's rock. This is some work of Tom Van Flandern
and it looks at his exploded planet model of the origin of comets. Orbital
evidence points to a recent origin of comets and the asteroid belt. That was
his conclusion. As Tom Van Flandern notes, the asteroid orbits exhibit
explosion signatures which are a set of characteristics in the distribution of
orbits that imply origin in an explosion. He argues that
some fragments will have highly elliptical cometary orbits that are
subject to a Sun's electric influence which matches the observed 70 to 80
percent of new comets appearing from one hemisphere of the sky centered on the
ecliptic. So the many similarities between asteroids and comets may be
simply explained. Clearly, Van Flandern's explosion hypothesis raises the serious
question, what could cause the planet to explode? However, his model applies
equally well to electrical machining of planetary surfaces due to close
encounters in the asteroid belt. Notably, Van Flandern predicted that asteroids
would tend to have natural satellites. This was almost universally rejected but
has since been verified. I would tell you that Tom's website and his book, which I
can't match the long title, are well worth reading. He was one of these people who
thought for himself. So we've come to asteroid origins. Asteroids
are said to be the shattered remnants of planetesimals or perhaps the remnants of
a failed planet resulting from the sweeping up of material from the
solar nebula by the early formation of Jupiter. So that's the standard catechism.
Let's have a look! The asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter exhibit
four major zones or families with an igneous group somewhere at 2.7
astronomical units. A metamorphic group affected by water around 3.2
astronomical units. And primitive, outside 3.4 astronomical units. That's how they are
classified anyway. Geophysicists use the zoning and classification of asteroids
in an effort to understand the formation of the solar system. Spectral signatures
in meteorites are looked for to identify their origin from asteroids. And the four
concentric zones within the asteroid belt yield four distinct types of
chondritic meteorites. Each meteorite type has few, if any,
components that are identical to those in other types, reflecting different
origins. You may notice in this image, the Vesta surface shows similarities to
Phobos and the Moon, with circular craters and chains of craters dotted along rills. It
suggests a common mechanism has been at work on these two bodies. Asteroid 253
Mathilde. Low velocity impacts of objects orbiting in the asteroid belt should
produce irregular shaped craters and spalling. But asteroids don't look as if
they had been splintered or broken off from larger objects. Their craters look
as though cleanly machined into the surface by a giant drill without
disturbing adjacent craters. Small craters tend to be perched on the rim of
large craters and large craters tend to have flat floors and central peaks. Some
craters are so huge that the asteroid should not have survived. Erik Asphaug,
who's in the picture there, is at the forefront of scientists studying the
rubble pile model of asteroids. He writes, "The images of Mathilde reveal some
surprises and provoke an overdue re-evaluation of asteroid geophysics.
Mathilde has survived blow after blow with almost farcical impunity
accommodating five great craters with diameters from 3/4 to 5/4 the asteroids
mean radius and none leaving any hint of global devastation. Given that one of
these great craters was last to form, pre-existing craters ought to be a major
scars of seismic degradation which they do not. And this is a prime example of
where the Electric Universe is the only valid model, I think, for something like
this. The distinction between asteroids and comets is ambiguous. Asteroid 3200
Phaeton resembles the main-belt asteroid Pallas and approaches the Sun closer
than any other named asteroid. However, Phaeton showed the anomalous
perihelion brightening and sported a stubby cometary dust tail just after
perihelion in 2009 and 2012. And like a comet, Phaeton seems to be the parent of
the most massive meteor shower, the Geminids, which
raises questions about how a rocky asteroid loses mass because then are
supposed to have the ice and so on to sublimate and blow material off. This
information begs several questions. Do asteroids and comets have a common
origin? Their main distinction being a difference in orbital eccentricity. Do
the rapid radial excursions of cometary bodies toward and away from the Sun,
produc the surface arcing? This would explain the mass loss and dust tale of
asteroid 3200 Phaeton. The Martian moon Phobos. Phobos measures 27 kilometers in
the longest direction. An impact of sufficient magnitude to create the huge
10 kilometer crater Stickney, should have shattered Phobos. But you notice the
parallel grooves focused on the crater. The conventional theoretical ideas for
the formation of the grooves are split into three main categories. Bulk
fracturing of the body inducing groove formation on the surface, superficial
scars caused by falling or rolling ejecta and just imagine it. And surface
traces of a layered intrinsic structure. Among many hypotheses, it has been
suggested that the grooves could have been dug by rolling Stickney ejecta. But
this hypothesis was questioned using two main arguments. No block was observed at
the end of the grooves nor do they run downslope. The answer of course, is far
simpler than any of these hypotheses. They're actually crater chains, often
parallel, of similar sized circular craters that may merge into grooves, a
definite marker of electrical arcing. And the same kinds of markings have been
observed on planets, moons, asteroids and now comet 67P. And here you will notice
the parallel grooves and the common orientation of the peaks. All marked
nicely by Ignacio with these arrows. And you can see
these grooves. The grooves generally point in the direction of the electric
field in that area when that area was sculpted which may have been at the
point, probably, when it was being formed. The discharge will have the grooves
track up the peaks to the highest point in the direction of the electric field
at the time. And those peaks themselves were probably a result of the electrical
separation with a more massive body. For those who came after Friday night,
I hope the breaking news, that I did then, will be available because there I go
into much more detail about the recent results. But one of the things that has
happened just in the last day or so, is that there is a hammer mechanism on the
lander on comet 67P which, I believe, had four different settings. One was a sort
of a weak tap in case it was fluffy. And it went, they were supposed to use levels
one, two and three. And four was only in emergencies, you know, break the glass.
They used four and apparently it made no impression. That's right. So; comets,
asteroids, meteorites and the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos; all have a
planetary origin and discoveries about them support Velikovsky's story
involving Mars and its menacing retinue of rubble. Thank you!
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