Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by TheThunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
How big is space?
Of course the question demands refinement
since the term ‘space’ merely describes a region that is empty of visible content.
When we consider for instance the space between the Earth and the Sun,
it's a distance of just over 90 million miles.
When we consider the distance between the Sun and the outer edge of its influence
called the heliopause,
it stretches to a degree that the human mind finds hard to comprehend,
to about 11 billion miles.
The nearest star system beyond our solar system
Alpha Centauri is about 24 trillion miles from Planet Earth.
Within the Milky Way galaxy, at least 200 billion stars inhabit
the roughly 100,000 light-years of space the Milky Way encompasses.
And beyond the Milky Way,
the Hubble telescope has already revealed an estimated 100 billion galaxies
with many billions more waiting to be discovered.
In other words, space is a big place.
One might think that within that unfathomable vastness
for objects to suffer the same fate as automobiles in busy traffic
would be an exceedingly rare occurrence.
Nevertheless, a cosmic collision is a process
that astronomers and astrophysicists routinely propose
to try to explain countless data at all scales throughout the cosmos.
In our own solar system, the ravaged surfaces of planets and moons
supposedly testify to random impacts over eons of time.
We do see types of craters that are reproduced in impact experiments.
However, we also see endless varieties of so-called ‘anomalous’ craters,
including straight-edged polygonal craters,
pristinely graded and spaced chains of highly circular craters,
craters made of concentric rings,
aligned craters,
so-called bull's-eye craters,
and the consistent preferential appearance of smaller craters
on the rims of larger craters.
That all of these craters are routinely produced in experiments with electrical discharge
remains a fact completely unacknowledged and unexplored in planetary science.
A cosmic collision is a process that institutionalized science has sanctioned for decades.
As is sometimes said: if your only tool is a hammer,
you see every problem as a nail.
Thus, today in the astronomical literature
objects smashing together for some reason is routinely proposed,
even in vast rooms of space where the odds of such collisions
are almost incalculably remote.
One of the clearest examples of this can be seen in comet science,
in the ad hoc theories that astronomers have proposed to try to explain a growing enigma.
When the nucleus of Comet 67P was first imaged by the ESA's Rosetta spacecraft,
scientists were puzzled by its double-lobed or "rubber duck" appearance.
The two lobes of the comet which are joined by a neck region
raised questions about the comet's origins and history.
The ESA team considered two hypotheses.
One was that localized erosion of a single object formed the distinct narrow neck.
The other was that a low-speed collision between two fully formed comets,
each of which formed from accretion in the "early solar system,"
produced the distinctive shape.
Scientists eventually settled on the collision hypothesis
in part because of the extraordinary layering of the nucleus's rocky material
which in many regions appears indistinguishable from sedimentary or igneous rock on Earth.
As investigator Matteo Massironi stated,
"It must have been a low-speed collision
in order to preserve such ordered strata to the depths our data imply."
Investigator Bjorn Davidsson said,
"...the striking structural similarities between the two lobes
imply that despite their initial independent origins,
they must have formed through a similar accretion process."
However, a more recent scientific study in 2018
argues that 67P's formation was much more recent,
a mere millions rather than billions of years ago.
As reported by phys.org,
"Comets which consists of two parts, like Chury,
can form after a catastrophic collision of large bodies.
Such collisions may have taken place in a later phase of our solar system,
which suggests that Chury can be much younger than previously assumed.
This is shown through computer simulations by an international research group
with the participation of the University of Bern."
Unlike earlier proponents of the collision hypothesis,
the investigators believe that 67P could not have survived
for billions of years in its current double-lobed shape,
so they suggest that a catastrophic collision destroyed a number of comets
from which some of the material immediately coalesced in the vacuum of space
to produce 67P's double-lobed nucleus,
as illustrated in the virtual reality animation on your screen.
In response to this hypothesis, these major points must be emphasized.
First is the truly incredible failure,
both experimental and observational,
of the accretion hypothesis to explain the rocky bodies in the solar system,
from planets down to asteroids or even comets.
As briefly described in a recent Washington Post article,
"According to the traditional story of the origin of the solar system,
the planets formed slowly from accretion,
as particles in the circumstellar disk clumped together to great pebbles,
then slightly larger spheres, on and on until they reached their current size."
But when scientists try to re-create this story with computer models, it breaks down.
Rather than growing, these incipient planets tend to splinter after reaching pebble size.
How could this process result in bodies the size of those in the asteroid belt,
let alone whole planets?"
The next problem is the incredible improbability of cometary collisions.
This improbability is highlighted on an official NASA webpage entitled
'Where Do Comets Come From?'
It states of the Kuiper Belt and the hypothetical Oort Cloud,
"Each of these regions contain billions of comets,
but they have so much room in the vast room of space
that they get no closer to each other than we on Earth do to the Sun."
A comet nucleus is typically no more than a few to several kilometers in diameter.
If comet 67P's double-lobed form were a lone or even rare occurrence,
then perhaps one could be tempted to accept the collision conjecture
as a miraculous one-time event.
However, it is an astounding fact
that the double-lobed appearance does not appear to be rare at all.
Although relatively few comet nuclei have been imaged to date,
the number of bodies that have similar shapes to 67P has grown increasingly daunting.
As noted by University of Arizona investigator Stephen Schwartz to space.com,
"Although the number of comets for which we know their shapes is still few,
the tendency so far is for them to be bi-lobate or two-lobed."
The comet Halley,
comet Borrelly,
comet Hartley,
and more recently radar images of the Comets 8P Tuttle
and comet 45P/HMP have all been suggested as so-called contact binaries.
And of course, comets are not the only rocky bodies to display the double-lobed shape.
Numerous asteroids are also double-lobed.
As described by Lance Benner of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
"Radar imaging has shown that about 15% of near-Earth asteroids
larger than 600 feet have this sort of lobed, peanut shape.
There must be a process that forms the double-lobe naturally."
And two of the five moons of the dwarf planet Pluto, Kerberos and Hydra,
also display forms which astronomers can only imagine
resulting from the collision of two objects.
In this view, relatively routine collisions
in the unfathomably vast rooms of interplanetary space
caused colliding objects to stick together
rather than fragmenting or simply repelling each other.
However, as longtime viewers of this series are well aware,
experiments with electric arcs routinely produce fused or double-lobed spheres
as seen on the screen in Dr. C.J. Ransom's experiments
to replicate the trillions of spherules called blueberries on the surface of Mars.
The similarity to Comet 67P and other double-lobed bodies is self-evident.
Of course every high-resolution image of a comet nucleus to date,
as well as the more recent radar images of comet nuclei,
reveal that comets are as far from "dirty snowballs" as one could imagine.
Their terrains are dry, rocky, blackened and geologically complex.
The complex layering of Comet 67P,
which astronomers can only attribute to accretion and collisions,
has also been seen on other comet nuclei,
including Tempel 1 in 2005.
This was an explicit prediction of the Electric Universe theory
which also proposed that comets, as well as asteroids and meteoroids,
were electrically torn from the surfaces of planets and moons.
It's not the position of the Electric Universe that cosmic collisions simply never occur.
We do see examples of craters on planets and moons
that may be best explained by kinetic impacts.
But given how common the appearances of double-lobed rocky bodies in our solar system,
including and especially comet nuclei,
astronomers must confront the actual probability of collisions forming those tiny bodies.
Again, a comet nucleus is a minuscule celestial object
and as noted by astronomer and specialist in celestial mechanics Tom Van Flandern,
"The mean distance between comets in the hypothetical Oort cloud is 1 billion km,
so collisions and accretions have negligible probability..."
Again, the double-lobed appearance is stunningly common
among the comet nuclei imaged to date.
Just how commonplace could cometary collisions have ever been
at any time in solar system history to produce this prevalent form.
This strange and unfounded conjecture
is now the standard interpretation in comet science
while no effort nor resources have been devoted to even examining
the genuine alternative hypothesis that the Electric Universe has offered.
In a forthcoming episode,
physicist Wal Thornhill will explore "doubleness cosmology"
where stars and planets will tend to be formed in pairs
and galaxies begin life with two "plasma sumps" in close orbit about each other.
It seems that objects formed in interplanetary Birkeland currents
will also begin life in pairs which may coalesce,
like the central bulge in a barred spiral
which has a peanut- shaped cross section.
So asteroids and comets may be expected to be found
with the same double-lobed structure due to their electrical birth.
The world of astronomy may inevitably confront a collision of cosmic proportions.
Not a collision between tiny bodies in the unimaginable vastness of space
but rather a collision with reality.