Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe
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Comet science stands at a crossroads
with enormous implications for the future of astronomy,
institutional science as a whole, and perhaps the entire culture,
in more ways than might be imagined.
In our last episode, we explored recent comet discoveries
that provide the final, definitive refutation
of the more than a half-century old ”Dirty Snowball” comet hypothesis.
Since the mid-20th century institutional science has subscribed to the belief
that comets are fluffy aggregates of ice and dust
that formed through condensation or accretion in the solar system's infancy,
four and a half billion years ago.
But for decades the chief principals of the Thunderbolts Project
have proposed a radically different theory of comets.
Comets are not billions of years old,
nor are they snowballs of ice and dust.
Rather, comets as well as asteroids and meteoroids,
were excavated from planets and moons through high-energy electrical discharges
or interplanetary Thunderbolts.
This theory has always predicted dry and rocky comet nuclei
which should be burnt black, covered with extremely fine dust and rubble,
and displaying distinctly planetary features.
Every space mission to date that has imaged a comet nucleus,
has dramatically affirmed the Electric Comet theory.
Scientists have marveled over comet nuclei that appear indistinguishable from asteroids
and have, without exception, displayed a stunning lack of the abundant surface ice
that Standard Theory predicted.
For three years on this series, we have reported on the amazing revelations
from the ESA Rosetta mission to the comet 67P.
Despite insurmountable preexisting evidence to the contrary,
mission scientists had expected the comet nucleus
to resemble a snowball of ice and dust.
As we showed in the previous episode,
recently released close-up images of the nucleus
could not more dramatically refute this expectation.
Numerous forms of stratified rock appear stunningly obvious on the comet.
Again, we compare them to planetary examples such as those on our own Earth.
Of course, comet scientists never predicted the feature
and how could they?
Stratification is thought to result from planetary geological processes
such as wind and water erosion shaping sedimentary rocks over millions of years,
or volcanic magma or lava producing igneous rocks.
In standard comet theory, as a comet approaches the Sun,
comet activity, including the production of the familiar coma and tail,
is thought to result from sublimating surface and near surface volatiles and outgassing.
Sublimating snowballs do not produce features
indistinguishable from the desert regions of rocky planets.
As we reported many times previously on this series,
other uniquely planetary features on the comet include sand dunes,
wind-streaked rocks
mesas.
And of course we see the sharp-edged cliffs,
giant boulders
and endless fields of rubble
that we must find if a comet was in fact torn from a planet.
In the previous episode, we also reported
on another devastating discovery for standard comet theory:
scientists’ observation of a comet that has become active
at the incredible distance of one and-a-half billion miles from the Sun,
or 16 astronomical units (AU).
Comet ice is not supposed to sublimate at distances beyond just 3 AU,
yet in the official NASA Hubble press release
we see that neither this discovery, nor the vast library of evidence,
disconfirming the dirty snowball hypothesis
have had any effect at all on NASA's view of comets.
The press release states,
"A solitary frozen traveler has been journeying for millions of years
toward the heart of our planetary system.
The wayward vagabond, a city-sized snowball of ice and dust called a comet,
was gravitationally kicked out of the Oort cloud,
it's frigid home at the outskirts of the solar system..."
As we also noted previously,
it's a bizarre paradox that a lead Rosetta scientist, Dr. Nicolas Thomas said in 2015,
"Rosetta has blown the dirty snowball idea out of the water."
And yet the Rosetta team has collectively held steadfastly
to the standard fiction of icy comets that formed four and a half billion years ago.
Of course, the required surface ice was never observed on the comet.
In January of 2016 the team summarized their findings as follows,
"...the great majority of ice is believed to come from under the comet's crust,
and very few examples of exposed water ice have been found on the surface."
Here, as in the aforementioned Hubble report,
we see an inexplicable devotion to falsified theory.
It seems fitting that the language
in an official scientific report includes the word “believed “.
To describe the small patches of water ice on the comet as "exposed",
implies a faith that an invisible reservoir of ice
exists underneath the comet’s desiccated rocky exterior.
This was the logic that scientists employed, who have taken to referring to comets as
"deep-fried ice cream".
Yet, how one gets stratified rock in ice cream
be it deep-fried or not, remains mysterious
and here we see again a disturbing disconnect between science theory
and science discovery.
Recent discoveries in planetary science affirm the continued conjectures
about subsurface comet ice are not necessary.
Scientists today are attempting to explain why the planet Mercury
has a surprising abundance of ice in craters at its North Pole.
One theory that scientists are proposing
was summarized in the September 19th, 2017 blog of the American Geophysical Union.
It states,
"...Mercury's exposure to solar winds containing protons,
could have combined with oxygen and hydrogen on the planet to form water."
For several years, scientists have employed the same reasoning
to explain the discovery of water on our own moon.
We suggest that a similar process may be responsible
for the scant ice seen on desiccated rocky comet nuclei,
yet another reason to end speculation about invisible subsurface ice.
Other obstacles remain before institutional science will likely entertain
any real alternative theories of comets and comet origins.
One is the detection of the signature of water molecules in cometary coma,
which comet scientists have always interpreted as proof of sublimating ices.
But long before the discovery of an active comet
at a billion and a half miles from the Sun,
ample reason existed for scientists to question such an interpretation.
Comet 67P was not the first comet to puzzle scientists
with its ironically overactive "water output",
In June of 2014, the ESA reported the surprisingly early detection of water
"sweating" off of the dry rocky comet.
They wrote,
"ESA's Rosetta spacecraft has found that comet 67P
is releasing the equivalent of two small glasses of water into space every second,
even at a cold 583 million kilometers from the Sun."
the principal investigator of Rosetta's microwave instruments stated
"We always knew we would see water vapor outgassing from the comet,
but we were surprised at how early we detected it."
But on a body that is covered with stratified rock,
where is the water coming from?
A theoretical path that comet scientists have yet to explore
is complex cometary electrochemistry.
In recent years, Thunderbolts colleague Dr. Franklin Anariba,
a specialist in electrochemistry,
has been presenting his thesis on comet water production by electrochemical means.
In a five-part Space News presentation in 2015,
Dr. Anariba proposed that a process of electrons stripping releases O₂, OH,
and other chemical species into the cometary coma.
The discovery of an electron density in the vicinity of the 67P nucleus
is therefore important.
It could mean that the chemical O₂ can absorb a negative charge through charge exchange,
which is then followed by a process called protonation via solar wind at the comet.
Water formation can then be explained via a series of pathways,
as Dr. Anariba has outlined.
Electrochemistry may also be the cause of the production of rich gases
that comets have produced at a great variety of distances from the Sun,
as Dr. Anariba has also discussed.
And it can account for the completely unexpected detection
of molecular oxygen at comet 67P,
yet another reason why no basis remains
to suggest that comets are four and a half billion years old.
As reported in India's national magazine Frontline,
"The detection of O2 was unexpected... all the primordial oxygen molecules,
which would have been there in a comet's evolution around 4.6 billion years ago,
should have disappeared by now...
the Rosetta discovery of O₂ in 67P is an astrophysical enigma."
In fact, in March of this year,
in a scientific paper published in the journal Nature Communications,
the authors essentially proposed that water molecules, coming off a comet,
become electrically charged.
Then the solar wind accelerates the charged molecules back to the comet’s surface.
There they pick up an oxygen atom from the surface from materials such as sand,
forming the detected O₂.
The electrical theory of comets is based on sound scientific foundations
and nothing in the theory is at odds with discovery.
In the Electric Universe, most comet activity
results from comets moving through regions of changing electrical potential.
Comets that spend most of their time in the outer reaches of the solar system
develop a "negative charge" with respect to their environment.
As they move toward the Sun's more positively charged domain,
they can experience voltage spikes in their dynamic plasma environment
and begin to discharge electrically.
The Sun's electromagnetic influence is now being shown, through science discovery,
to be far more vast throughout the solar system than Standard Theory has ever imagined.
In 2016, the Cassini spacecraft made the surprising discovery
of so-called magnetic ropes that stretch nearly 900 million miles from the Sun
to the gas giant Saturn
and interact with the planet in a manner similar to the Birkeland currents
that are now known to produce Earth's auroras.
Comets can also become active
when passing through any more positively charged region of space,
including when encountering the vast magnetotail of a planet.
This theory can explain much comet activity
which has only proved baffling to mainstream theorists,
including comets that have disintegrated or exploded
at impossibly vast distances from the Sun
and the astonishing electrical energies
measured when comets have closely approached planets,
including Shoemaker-Levy 9 at Jupiter
and comet Siding Spring at Mars.
This, of course, explains why comet activity can occur at distances from the Sun
where invisible hypothetical ices cannot sublimate.
Another obstacle for comet scientists
is a faith in their measurements of a comet's density.
After all, said measurements in 67P would suggest that the images do in fact lie
and underneath the obviously rocky surface is a more fluffy, icy interior.
However, investigators might have been given pause
shortly after the landing of the Philae probe on the comet nucleus.
After the lander bounced and rolled into the shade of a towering rocky cliff,
the team attempted to hammer the probe into the comet’s soil
but the hammer was bested by the comet’s obviously rocky composition.
The ESA describes the event as follows,
"The probe then started to hammer itself into the subsurface,
but was unable to make more than a few millimeters of progress,
even at the highest power level of the motor."
Similar surprises awaited NASA's Stardust-Next team
when they reimaged the surface of comet Tempel 1
after the Deep Impact mission fired a copper projectile into the comet nucleus.
The team found that the projectile’s impact crater
was nowhere near as dramatic as expected,
indicating a much tougher surface
than the comet’s density measurements would seem to indicate.
But incredibly, the team proposed the projectile did in fact leave a dramatic crater
which somehow achieved a miraculous self-healing.
They hypothesized that material exploded off of the comet at tremendous velocities
and then somehow fell back down in the comet’s near-zero gravity to refill the crater.
As Space.com reported in 2011,
"Temple 1’s man-made crater partially healed itself
as the ejecta settled and refilled part of the depression."
The ramifications of this problem reach far beyond comet science
and affect all of cosmology.
For decades, the chief science advisor to The Thunderbolts Project Wal Thornhill,
has argued that measurements of an object's density cannot be accurate
if one fails to account for the electromagnetic stresses on the body.
In 2004, when NASA's Stardust mission imaged another comet Wild 2,
which also appears indistinguishable from an asteroid, Thornhill wrote
"Density calculations based on gravitational perturbation theory are worthless.
Gravity is a weak dipole electric force between subatomic particles.
So, the charge distribution in a body affects gravity strongly.
Comets are highly charged bodies and will exhibit anomalous gravity.
Newton's gravitational ‘constant’, G, is a dependent variable.
It is dependent on the electrical state of a body.”
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson is famously quoted as saying,
"The good thing about science is that it's true, whether or not you believe in it."
Those who have followed this series will surely recognize the amazing irony
of deGrasse Tyson's statement.
In our previous episode we concluded with the question,
”Is science self-corrective?”
Apply the question to comet science today and the answer is self-evident.
Yet deGrasse Tyson is correct. A thing is either true or not
and Nature has no regard for human beliefs.
The repetition of the conjecture of our solar system’s four and a half billion year history
does not make it true.
The repetition of the conjecture of comets as dirty snowballs does not make it true.
The consensus nature of any belief does not make it true.
What is the truth about comets?
As Galileo Galilei stated,
"All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered;
the point is to discover them."
We again implore viewers to simply look at the pictures.
An easy path of discovery awaits,
leading one further into our electric universe.
For continuous updates on Space News from the Electric Universe,
stay tuned to
Thunderbolts.info