Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project
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Scientists working on NASA's historic Juno mission to the gas giant Jupiter
have recently presented their early findings for the first time.
Like so many other recent space missions,
what they have discovered is not what they expected.
As reported by Newscientist.com,
"... the findings are already challenging assumptions about everything
from the planet's atmosphere to its interior."
One of the biggest surprises is the enormous strength of Jupiter's magnetic field,
even more powerful and "much more irregular" than scientists expected
challenging long-held beliefs about the so called dynamo inside of Jupiter
that is thought to produce its magnetic field.
As principal investigator Scott Bolton stated,
"I didn't expect all the theories to be wrong,
but there's motion going on in the planet we did not anticipate."
In part one of this two-part presentation,
physicist and chief science advisor to The Thunderbolts Project, Wal Thornhill,
begins his in-depth analysis of the Juno data
including the many victories that already seem evident for the Electric Universe theory.
On May 25th NASA held a media teleconference on the first science from Juno at Jupiter.
Sadly, the science used old beliefs to interpret data that conflicted with those beliefs.
The result is that Jupiter up-close looks nothing like the once upon a time,
billions of years ago, stories we have been told.
Not one model of the interior of Jupiter survived Juno's close encounter with the planet
except for the Electric Universe model.
So here's an Electric Universe analysis of the material presented at the teleconference.
Scott Bolton, Juno principal investigator,
began by noting how different Jupiter looks from what we expected.
He said, "Juno is, in effect, looking inside Jupiter.
Jupiter was thought to be boring and uniform inside
-- anywhere you looked it would all look the same.
What we're finding is anything but that...
it's very different, very complex.
The north pole of Jupiter has incredibly complex features --
cyclones and anticyclones all over the poles that weren't expected.
If anyone had shown you a photo like this a few years ago
they wouldn't recognize it as Jupiter.
Also, the north and south poles don't really look like each other,
which is also a puzzle to scientists.
Are the cyclones stable or will they last like the Great Red Spot,
which has lasted 300 years at least.
Or is this something that's dynamic?"
A Cambridge University textbook says that Jupiter, with its mass of 300 Earths,
is composed mostly of hydrogen and helium
with a heavy element core of roughly 10 Earth masses.
Being so far from the Sun, it was expected that solar heating
would play little part in Jupiter's atmospheric motion
so that it should be boring and uniform inside.
So there's an unexplained energy source driving the numerous giant cyclones
at the poles of Jupiter and the ammonia plume at the equator
that has not been factored into settled planetary science.
But 23 years ago there was a natural probe of Jupiter's atmosphere
that exposed that energy source.
It was the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet fragment encounters with Jupiter,
during the week of 16th to 22nd of July 1994.
Notice I didn't say impacts.
There are many problems with the settled science of that event.
So it's good policy to return to the earliest reports of those events
because of the human tendency to forget, rationalize
or ignore evidence that doesn't fit our beliefs.
Some astronomers predicted that the comet fragments were too small
to have much effect when they hit Jupiter.
"There's a chance we will see very little." said the late Eugene Shoemaker,
co-discoverer of the comet, shortly before the event.
Shoemaker-Levy 9 couldn't even be found in images taken
before the comet broke up on its first brush with Jupiter.
Astronomer Brian Marsden thought it was only 1 to 2 kilometers in diameter,
"It's going to be tough to see much" he concluded.
"I don't think there's going to be a very large explosion."
So the eventual dazzling display baffled astronomers.
Ultraviolet images showed glowing streaks in Jupiter's northern hemisphere
which appeared as almost mirror images of glows from the impact site
of fragment G in the southern hemisphere.
The Jovian auroral displays appeared to be triggered by electrically charged particles
released during the impacts in the south,
following a looping arc northward along the planet's magnetic field
until they fell back into the planet's atmosphere, creating a glow in the north.
After a year's analysis by hundreds of talented scientists,
Nature issued the following statement,
"First seen was a faint glow that slowly increased in brightness on a time-scale of tens of seconds,
believed to be due to a large number of small meteors in the coma
surrounding each Shoemaker-Levy 9 fragment.
The meteor shower was followed by a sharp increase in brightness
as the main part of the fragment entered the Jovian atmosphere...
A few tens of seconds later, a fireball exploded up the 'chimney'
created in the atmosphere by the bolide."
Forget the ad-hoc meteor shower.
Electrically charged comet fragments would be expected to exhibit
a brightening cometary coma as they approach Jupiter,
just as comets do on approaching the electric sun.
The glow increases until a sudden arc discharge occurs
between the comet fragment and the charged body of Jupiter.
The same effect is often seen when a sun-grazing comet
causes a coronal mass ejection from the sun.
The steep increase in brightness, that astronomers observed,
was more like a lightning flash
than the light curve of a bright bolide's entry into the Earth's atmosphere.
In fact, it was expected that the fragments
would flare several times like those fireballs.
That didn't happen.
That idea and the fireball exploding up a 'chimney' from the clouds below
are simply assumptions of the mechanical impact model.
And there were many other anomalies for the impact model.
As we shall see, there is no evidence
that the comet fragments got down to the clouds intact.
In Jupiter's plasma environment we can expect electrical forces
to affect the trajectories of the charged comet fragments.
Such forces would cause deviations from the expected impact times.
And in fact, impact times are on average 8 minutes later than expected.
One of the largest pieces, fragment G,
showed spectral evidence of magnesium when it was just ten hours from impact.
Such metals only show up when comets graze around the sun,
but whatever was tearing magnesium from the fragment,
as it sped in through Jupiter's magnetosphere,
couldn't drive off enough water to be detectable.
That failure to observe water gave rise to questioning
whether the comet might be an asteroid.
After all, only the fuzziness of Shoemaker-Levy 9 identified it as a comet
and some asteroids have been observed occasionally to show fuzziness.
The Electrical Comet model explains each and every mystery of Shoemaker-Levy 9.
An electric comet is as dry as an asteroid.
The fuzziness of a comet is due to the electrical coronal glow
of its enveloping plasma sheath.
When the electrical stress of the comet's surface increases beyond a threshold,
arcs will appear at the surface which sputter atoms such as magnesium
from the minerals there.
That this should occur shortly before the collision is not surprising.
Jupiter's magnetosphere is the most active electrical environment for a comet
other than a close encounter with the sun.
The Galileo spacecraft on its way to Jupiter, the Hubble Space Telescope
and many terrestrial observatories tracked the fragments as they approached Jupiter.
Their data highlighted another mystery.
Some collisions that were calculated to occur just beyond Jupiter's limb,
and that should have been invisible to all but the Galileo spacecraft,
were seen from the earth.
In a NASA news report, Dr. Andrew Ingersoll said,
"In effect we are apparently seeing something we didn't think we had any right to see."
Dr. Torrence Johnson of JPL commented,
"It seems clear that something was happening high enough to be seen beyond the curve of the planet."
The predictable electrical event high in Jupiter's ionosphere,
prior to the fragments striking the upper atmosphere, did indeed occur.
What then were the vertical jets, seen rising 3,000 kilometers
above Jupiter's clouds and known as plumes,
and what were the crescent-shaped dark features
that resulted from the fallback of the plume onto the atmosphere?
The dark material came to be known technically as the brown stuff.
Its nature unknown.
The geophysicist and expert on impact cratering, Dr. Jay Melosh,
suggested that the comet fragments would penetrate Jupiter's atmosphere so deeply
before exploding that they would be swallowed up and we would see very little.
Others propose that each fragment would dig a tunnel of fire in Jupiter's atmosphere
before exploding and sending a plume of hot atmospheric and cometary material
from the top of the tunnel into space.
This was the plume model that was explored to try to explain the strange dark fallout pattern.
However, the plume model could not explain the clear zone between the dark core and the crescent,
nor could it explain the radial lines dissecting the crescent.
All of the unexplained oddities begin to make sense
if a plasma discharge occurred between the highly charged comet fragments
and Jupiter's ionosphere.
That's why the light from fragments, that were expected to impact beyond the limb,
was unexpectedly visible.
The light from a discharge beyond Jupiter's limb,
but 3,000 kilometres above Jupiter's cloud tops,
would have been visible from Earth.
The electrical nature of the event also explains why comet fragments of different sizes
created flashes at the same height.
The discharges occurred as each charged fragment hit Jupiter's ionosphere,
or electrical plasma sheath, well above the atmosphere.
The comet fragments were destroyed like exploding capacitors
before reaching the atmosphere.
Those ionospheric discharges would have triggered an upward discharge
from the atmosphere below.
In the very low pressure of space
it would have been in the form of a compact plasmoid.
Evidence for this interpretation is the observation that the so-called plumes
continue to radiate at the shortest wavelengths
which is not to be expected from a rising hot gaseous plume as it expands and cools.
Additional evidence for a powerful plasma discharge came from the fallout material,
the brown stuff.
The Hubble Space Telescope found
"most surprising were the strong signatures from sulfur-bearing compounds
like diatomic sulfur or disulfur..."
Disulfur is a molecule with a very short lifetime
and its origin is one of the great mysteries of comet chemistry.
However if we turn to the only known natural source,
Jupiter's innermost Galilean moon Io,
gaseous disulfur has been detected emanating from the vicinity of Pele volcano.
Plasma scientists, following a suggestion from Professor Thomas Gold,
recognized the so-called volcanoes on Io
as an electrical exchange with Jupiter
producing umbrella-shaped plasma gun discharge plumes
which have dusted the moon with colorful sulfur molecules
including red and brown variants in circular electromagnetic fallout patterns.
Now a large quantity of oxygen was observed in the Shoemaker-Levy 9 events at Jupiter,
so it seems that a powerful plasma discharge
is capable of fusing two oxygen atoms to produce a sulfur atom
which then combine to form the colorful molecular sulfur variants
including the short-lived disulfur molecule.
This also means that Io was originally an icy moon like its Galilean siblings
but has had the oxygen in its ice progressively converted to the observed
global dusting of yellow sulfur.
This is currently the only proposal to simply explain this oddity of Io.
It may be the children, listening on their school's radio telescope,
provided the most significant observation of all.
They said that the Shoemaker-Levy 9 collisions were accompanied by bursts of radio emission
just like those from a sunspot activity on the sun.
New Scientist called this "Jupiter's surprise radio broadcast."
"Never in 23 years of Jupiter observations have we seen
such a rapid and intense increase in radio emission," said Michael Klein of JPL.
The radio emission peaked on the 23rd of July,
just after the last comet fragment hit, and it declined thereafter.
Klein had expected dust from the comet to absorb electrons
which otherwise might contribute to radio emissions.
Instead, extra electrons were supplied by a source which, as yet, is a mystery.
But it's no mystery.
Like all comets, Shoemaker-Levy 9 was negatively charged,
its fragments supplying copious electrons for the radio emissions.
The fate of Shoemaker Levy 9 thus provides a consistent picture
of the electrical nature of comets and Jupiter.
Leading plasma physicist Hannes Alfven drew the sun's electrical circuit
showing the planets orbiting in its equatorial current sheet,
known incorrectly to astrophysicists as the solar wind.
So it's electrical energy from the sun's circuit that drives
the weather on planets with atmospheres like Jupiter.
The cyclones and anticyclones at the poles
are the footprints of twisting Birkeland currents
following Jupiter's magnetic field into the polar regions.
As a result, Jupiter's magnetic field is more complex than expected in those regions.
Fran Bagenal, a planetary scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder, said,
"Rather than having one big wire carrying all the current,
you've got multiple little wires all spread out."
This scattered pattern means that the structure and origin
of Jupiter's northern and southern lights are more complicated than previously thought
because the electrically charged particles that produce them
are flowing along a variety of paths.
On further inspection we should see evidence of the unique signatures of Birkeland currents
in the features at Jupiter's poles.
We can learn more about Jupiter's electrical features by
re-examining Kristian Birkeland's experiments, published in 1908,
than all of the modern computer modeling based on invalid concepts.
All you will hear from experts are answers to questions they pose for themselves.
But their narrow expertise doesn't fit them to answer questions outside their training.
That's why paradigm shifts are so tough.
Meanwhile, stay tuned to find out what's really beneath the clouds of Jupiter
and its Great Red Spot.
For continuous updates on Space News from the Electric Universe,
stay tuned to
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