Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
The following Space News is a companion piece
to the forthcoming eighth installment of our series,
The Top 10 Reasons the Universe is Electric.
The ravaged surfaces of solid bodies in space, tell stories.
Stories that demand valid interpretations in order to decipher.
A dramatic type of feature observed on every solid body is a crater,
a depression that seems to speak to some violent event in the distant past.
The so-called 'debate' in planetary science only ever entertained
two possible causes of craters, impacts or volcanism.
For decades, the consensus theory in planetary science
has been that impactors are the cause of the abundant craters seen on planets,
moons, asteroids and more recently, even comets.
But on all of these bodies, we've observed craters lacking any conventional explanation.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said,
"The discovery of truth is prevented more effectively,
not by the false appearance things present and which mislead into error,
not directly by weakness of the reasoning powers,
but by preconceived opinion, by prejudice."
The most fundamental prejudice that is directed to space sciences for decades,
is the belief that space is electrically inert.
Throughout the Space Age,
every new discovery has been interpreted through a lens that views gravity
and gravity alone as the force that shapes the heavens.
Dating back more than half a century,
experimentalists have demonstrated that electrical discharge is a viable explanation
for countless types of craters seen in our solar system.
Today, this ongoing research provides a theoretical bedrock
for the growing Electric Universe geology community.
In this episode,
we shall explore a brief overview of some of the most puzzling types of craters
that demand new theoretical pathways in planetary science.
Crater Chains
The image on your screen is a dramatic crater chain seen on Jupiter's moon Ganymede.
The official NASA webpage on this feature states,
"This chain of 13 craters probably formed by a comet
which was pulled into pieces by Jupiter's gravity as it passed too close to the planet.
Soon after this breakup, the 13 fragments crashed onto Ganymede in rapid succession."
But what is the probability of an impacting body disintegrating,
then forming a pristinely graded and spaced line of fragments
to produce this chain of overlapping circular craters?
Just one of the several objections to this hypothesis
is that the cleanly cut crater floors show no evidence of ejecta from supposed impacts.
This fact also precludes the notion that a collapsed lava tube
could have caused the crater chain
since the remains of the tube's roof are not inside the craters.
This type of geologic anomaly might seem merely curious, in just one or two instances,
but similar stunning chains of craters are seen on numerous other bodies
including the Moon,
Mars,
Mercury,
asteroids
and the dwarf planet Ceres.
Consider this image released in 2016 of crater chains on Ceres.
As we look at the floor of Dawn-2 crater on Ceres;
from a distance, we see what appear to be fractures or networks of channels.
Howewer, on closer examination we see that most if not all of the channels
are actually composed of chains of craters.
Such puzzling networks of channels and parallel crater chains
are seen elsewhere in the solar system.
These features run in virtually all directions on the Martian moon Phobos.
The official NASA webpage on Phobos states of these features,
"The linear features and crater chains from lower left to upper right
are believed to be results of the impact which formed Stickney crater."
The aforementioned Stickney crater is so massive
that any impactor large enough to create it probably should have destroyed the moon.
But as we've outlined in countless presentations, experiments with electrical discharges
routinely produce parallel crater chains and channels
such as those seen on your screen.
Polygonal or Square Craters
The hexagonal forms you see on your screen
are extremely difficult to explain with the impact hypothesis.
These polygonal craters appear on Mars
and similar forms appear repeatedly on the respective surfaces of Mercury,
the dwarf planet Ceres
and on the Saturnian moons Mimas, Tethys and Rhea.
Experiments with impacts do not produce such polygonal craters.
Some scientists have theorized that in these instances
impactors have perfectly struck fault lines for some reason
and the fault lines collapsed to produce the hexagonal forms.
Of course, high-energy electrical discharge has never been considered as an explanation.
Planetary scientists should consider the forms created by filaments
produced by a charged particle beam.
While experiments with kinetic impacts do not produce polygonal craters,
experiments with electrical discharge do.
Electrical discharge might also be the best explanation for the odd square craters
seen on some planets, moons and asteroids.
Here we see distinctly square craters on the asteroid Eros,
certainly nothing one expects if mechanical collisions created the craters.
Aligned Craters
On your screen is an image of 3 aligned craters in the Noachis Terra region on Mars.
NASA scientists describe the craters as follows,
"Three aligned meteor impact craters on the floor of a much larger crater
in the Noachis Terra region.
The craters may have formed together from a single event
in which the impactor (the meteor) was broken into three pieces."
A single event is required
because there is no rubble on the floors of the craters from adjacent impacts.
The blast force would have had to act simultaneously
to displace laterally the ejecta situated between the impacts.
But the only imaginable way to get three craters in a single event
is to have the impactor break into three pieces.
And then the problem returns to the first observation of three aligned craters.
It's unlikely that a meteor breaking up
under the forces of heat and shock in the atmosphere
would produce pieces that travel abreast to the suface.
From the Electric Universe perspective,
these aligned craters are better explained as electrical discharge scars.
An electric arc impinging on a surface would "machine out" a circular hole,
much like a router bit.
Often the bottom will be fairly flat.
The sides will be steep and the removed material will be lifted away
leaving a clean excavation.
"Bullseye Craters"
The two craters in this image show all of the features
one expects of depressions cut by electrical discharge.
Typical flat floors, steep sides, pinched-up rims and terraces around their walls.
But instead of central peaks, they have central craters.
Two more craters that are similar lie to the southwest.
Thunderbolts colleague Michael Gmirkin in pointing out these craters
has labeled them "Bullseye Craters"
in reference to the middle concentric circles of a dart board
emphasizing the difficulty of hitting the precise center consistently.
Under the impact interpretation, central craters would be caused by a second impact
that coincidentally struck exactly in the center of the previous impact.
The impactors that created the craters
would have to hit a perfect "bullseye" to create this effect.
It might happen once.
Twice in close proximity is extremely unlikely.
But four times in the same neighborhood stretches the meaning of "coincidential"
beyond the covers of the dictionary.
On your right is a region of the dwarf planet Ceres
which shows numerous craters with smaller craters at or near their centers.
On the left is an image of anode cratering and electrical discharge machining.
In several instances, we see a central, so called bullseye crater.
Domed Craters
The images to the right on your screen show large craters on Mars
that contain mysterious spherical domes.
The images to your left show spheres in craters
in Dr. C.J. Ransom's electrical discharge experiments.
Dr. Ransom was compelled to explore a possible electrical explanation
to the Martian "blueberries",
tiny, BB-like spherules embedded by the trillions in the Martian surface.
He obtained a quantity of hematite, an iron-rich material
that is the primary constituent of the soil surrrounding the blueberries.
And he blasted it with an electric arc.
The embedded spheres created by the arc,
appear to replicate the features of the blueberries on Mars.
In simple appearance,
the embedded spheres created by Ransom also look surprisingly similar
to the enormous Martian craters and "domes" seen on your screen.
This is significant because of the well-known scalability of electrical discharge.
What occurs on a small scale also occurs on larger scales.
In contrast to the rover "blueberry" images
the domed craters on Mars range in size from kilometers in diameter
down to a hundred meters or less.
At the present time, Ransom's electrical discharge experiments
have provided the only fact-based explanation for these anomalous formations.
Therefore, it must be asked,
could the blueberries and the dome craters have been produced by the same electrical force
acting on widely different scales?
Craters and Concentric Circles
Geologists have never adequately explained
why craters tend to be so consistently circular.
Early investigations into craters on the Moon
recognized that more than 90% of the circular lunar craters
demanded that the impacting objects strike vertically
so it was proposed that hypervelocity impacts
would cause explosions above the surface to create the circular craters.
The extreme circularity of so many craters, however,
does not require such unlikely ad-hoc explanations
if electrical discharge created them.
The machine-like precision of electrical discharge to produce circular craters
is why the process is used in industry.
This also explains craters' pinched-up rims
and their often flat and cleanly-cut floors,
bearing no resemblance at all to so-called 'impact craters'.
But an even greater mystery for planetary scientists is the many instances of craters
that reveal astonishing patterns of internal concentric circles.
One such instance is Richat crater in the Saharan desert.
Planetary scientists once believed it was an impact crater.
A hypothesis they had to abandon due to the structure's flat middle
as well as the absence of so-called 'shock-altered rock'.
The volcanic interpretation is also unlikely
since there's no dome, nor any igneous or volcanic rock.
Many scientists now believe the structure was produced by rock being uplifted
and then sculpted by erosion.
However, just one obvious problem with the theory
is acknowledged in an 2002 Astronomy Picture Of the Day.
It states,
"Why the Richat Structure is nearly circular remains a mystery."
Similar concentric rings in craters present the same mysteries to scientists,
including Silverpit crater under the North Sea off of Great Britain.
And on Mars, including the famous Schiaparelli crater.
And this crater, near the so-called 'volcano' Elysium Mons.
Consider these side-by-side comparisons of planetary craters
versus those created by electrical discharge in the laboratory.
Richat crater in the Sahara
Electric discharge crater
Let us also consider the similarities between planetary craters with peak rings
and craters produced by electrical discharge machining.
In fact, when one recognizes the extrordinary number of electrical and plasma analogs
for so-called ‘anomalous’ planetary craters,
the notion that such analogs are merely coincidental becomes increasingly improbable.
This includes the completely unexplained pattern
of smaller craters appearing preferentially on the rims of larger craters
as seen so clearly on the Moon and Mercury.
With such clear and undeniable experimental analogs,
it is not rational nor scientific for this theoretical pathway
to remain unexplored in planetary science.
As we will show in the forthcoming installment of our series,
The Top 10 Reasons the Universe is Electric,
a new story of our solar system's history is waiting to be told,
a drama already expressed in the myths and folklore around the world
called The Thunderbolts of The Gods.