Welcome to Space News from the Electric Universe,
brought to you by The Thunderbolts Project™
at Thunderbolts.info
Of all the entrenched beliefs that took hold in 20th century science,
few have proved less successful than the dirty snowball hypothesis of comets.
The vision of comets as blobs of ice and dust,
that congealed or accreted 4.5 billion years ago in the solar system's infancy,
has only grown increasingly untenable in the face of scientific discovery
and has found no support at all in any of the space missions to comets to date.
The surprises and intractable problems certainly did not begin
with the ESA's Rosetta mission to comet 67P
but the mission findings underscored the desperate need
for a radically new view of comets.
As seen on your screen, this artistic rendition illustrates what comet scientists
expected to find prior to NASA's mission to comet Halley.
A smooth, snowy, icy surface that would sublimate
like a slowly melting ice-cream cone as it moved closer to the Sun.
Of course, this conjecture bears no resemblance at all
to any of the comet nuclei that have been imaged to date.
Every common nucleus we've seen is desiccated and rocky,
visually more similar to asteroids than comet scientists had ever imagined.
And now, the most detailed close-up images ever captured of a comet nucleus
reveal a terrain that is stunningly complex
including undeniably planetary features
such as mesas, cliffs, fields of boulders and rubble, sand dunes and stratigraphy
that appears indistinguishable from sedimentary and igneous rock on our own planet.
How could a comet show features which, if they were seen on our own earth,
geologists would attribute to eons of wind and water erosion.
Rosetta scientists have had no choice but to admit the complete failure
of the dirty snowball hypothesis.
As principal investigator dr. Nicholas Thomas stated,
"Rosetta has blown the dirty snowball idea out of the water."
The rocky and complex comet nucleus
was an explicit prediction of the electric comet theory
which has proposed for decades that comets are neither dirty snowballs
nor billions of years old.
Rather, the chief principals of The Thunderbolts Project have proposed that
comets were recently electrically blasted from the surfaces of planets and moons.
But of course, the evidence for the electric comet
goes far beyond the appearance of comet nuclei.
As we've outlined in dozens of previous episodes
and in the feature-length documentary film "The Electric Comet"
the dramatic displays of comets are fundamentally electrical discharge activity.
In part one of this two-part presentation, Thunderbolts colleague Peter Mungo Jupp
offers an overview of some of the most compelling evidence for electric comets.
On June 1994, the rogue comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 approached Jupiter.
As it did, observers on Earth soon realized it was on a collision course.
But what he did next was totally unexpected.
It split into 23 sections and one by one they flash-impacted
on the surface of the mighty Jupiter.
Each flash-devastated area was the size of Earth.
For the first time, modern man had witnessed a comet collide with a planet.
Had mankind witnessed just such an event in the past?
Could it happen in the future?
Even more spectacular, what happens when a comet plunges into the Sun?
Look at this picture as a tremendous coronal mass ejection appears on the other side.
Now, these coronal mass ejections release large quantities of matter
and electromagnetic radiation into space above the Sun's surface.
Either near the corona, sometimes called the solar prominence,
or farther into the planetary system or beyond.
These are interplanetary ICMEs.
The ejected material is magnetized plasma
consisting primarily of electrons, protons and some heavier ions
such as helium and iron.
They result in a billion tons of matter traveling at a million miles an hour.
These giant magnetic structures blast off the Sun into the solar system
and can create major disturbances in Earth's magnetic field
resulting in these beautiful Auroras.
They're also a source of solar energetic particles SEPs.
Now although CMEs are huge and powerful, they're very thin
and spread out with just a few particles per cubic centimeter.
Much of the power they have to affect us comes from their magnetic fields
which are part of the interplanetary magnetic field
and can disturb the magnetic field of the Earth.
Usually takes CME 2 to 4 days to reach Earth.
So you can see, a comet that can cause a CME must be incredibly powerful
and we underestimate them because nowadays we think of them basically
as a traveling electric rock.
There's got to be something much more powerful going on.
So we can see the incredible power of a comet
as it impacts or discharges on another body.
But before we go on, how are comets formed?
Ancient mythology, for instance Hesiod, claims, for instance,
that proto planet Venus sprung fully-armed from the body of the planet Jupiter.
Is there any such truth in this as Velikovsky for instance claims?
Let's examine some of the authors, present-day authors.
For instance, the Russian Vsekhsvyatskii from Kiev State University.
He was adamant that there was good evidence
that comets can spring from planets such as Jupiter and Saturn.
He found that a persuasive agreement
between periods of sharp decline in Jupiter's brightness
associated with the appearance of clouds of volcanic ash above the planet's cloud cover
and the appearance of new comets, was coincidental.
Particularly noteworthy was, in his opinion, the connection between
Jupiter's bursts of activity in 1872 to 1888 and its drop in brightness,
on the one hand, and the appearance of the bright comets Wolf 1
and Brooker 2 and the discovery of four other comets
as well as between the processes on Jupiter in 1910 to 1920
and the development of a whole series of comets separated by intervals of 10 to 11 years.
However, the most remarkable of all
are the very recent events arising from the immense burst of activity in Jupiter,
in 1961 to 1965.
He found these displays of activity were recorded both (by)
our own observations and by many other observers
and were accompanied by a sharp drop in the brightness of the planet Jupiter.
As a result of the appearance of ash clouds around the planet,
this burst of activity repeating the great processes of 1872 to 1880, began in 1961.
A dark equatorial belt formed around the planet and gradually became less dense
although it still persisted in the first half of 1965
and did not disappear completely until the end of that year.
The new comets 1963; Kearns-Kwee, Tsuchinshan and Tsuchinshan 2,
emerged nearly simultaneously from Jupiter's sphere of influence.
The obvious correspondent to this process occurring in Jupiter's system
is a new and, from his viewpoint, an irrefutable proof
of the eruptive formation of these comets
providing direct evidence of the ejection theory
and the same conclusion is arrived from the calculations of the encounter probability.
This is remarkable.
One would therefore suspect that this eruptive process is electrical in origin,
perhaps like an underground earthquake occurring on Jupiter
leading to an eruption of and discharge of a comet.
I wanted to talk with Wal Thornhill to get some of the later ideas
about the electrical nature of comets
and then move on to the solid structure resembling planets
that comets, we now believe, possess.
Now there's a lot of new knowledge being gained about comets just recently.
What, can you give us a few, let's say, details what comets are and where they come from?
Yes, I think one of the things that I can say
is that we don't really understand comets or their origins at present.
We have a story that's been concocted to try and explain them
but when you understand that the origin of the solar system itself
is still not understood
then you can also believe that the origin of comets,
which is supposed to be the leftovers of the solar system, also is not understood.
In fact, it's one of these cases in science where
we have to believe that something we can't see exists.
This cloud of comets at some vast distance from the Sun
which occasionally get knocked towards the solar system and enter
and create, you know, the marvelous displays we occasionally see.
The origin of comets is actually documented by our most ancient civilizations
and they all point to a planet having been a comet
at one stage, the archetypal comet Venus.
Now, this was first promulgated by our friend Velikovsky
who was laughed at by a lot of the scientific community
but what sort of things was he saying?
Well, he was saying that the solar system does have a recent history.
Now generally, we are taught that the clockwork solar system
has existed, much as we see it today, for billions of years.
That's pure presupposition. We cannot say that for sure
especially when we don't understand how the solar system was formed initially.
I mean, it's not generally taught in school that the gravitational theory
of the collapse of a cloud of matter to form the stars and the planets,
it just doesn't work.
No one's been able to show how you would actually make that work to form planets or stars.
So if you discard that, then the field is open for new ideas
and this is one of the things that Velikovsky has contributed to, I think,
in that he provided evidence that the solar system has a recent history.
And if that's so, then there are things we do not understand
about planetary orbits and dynamics and which have to be looked at with fresh eyes.
We have to come to it as beginners.
So he had actually proposed that the solar system in, let's say, prehistoric or recent historical times
was actually different from the one we see today.
- Yes. - Would that be correct?
That's correct
and if a planet can form a cometary object in the sky,
then that raises all sorts of questions about what comets really are
because planets are not supposed to lose material into space and form long tails
and put on a cometary display even if they are in an elliptical orbit.
And herein lies the key, I think.
A comet is any body on an elliptical orbit about the Sun
and the degree of cometary display depends on the ellipticity
that is the amount, the difference in distance between the closest approach
and the most distant part of the orbit from the Sun.
So the further away it is from the Sun, the more powerful display possibly...
That's right. Long period comets tend to generally show a much more interesting
and they're more visible in the sky, let's put it that way.
And this, in the electrical model of the formation of the solar system,
and of planets and so on, and comets,
is because the Sun in this instance
is the most positively charged object in the solar system
and there is a weak electric field extending from the Sun
all the way to the what's called the heliosphere,
the boundary of the Sun's influence in the stellar neighborhood.
Which essentially is the outer solar system.
Yes, well beyond Pluto.
It's about a hundred times the distance of the Earth from the Sun.
So it's a considerable volume.
Now, if there is even the tiniest electric field, they're even measured in volts per kilometer,
then it means, over those vast distances,
an object will experience a quite different voltage,
a much lower voltage in the outer reaches of the solar system that it would nearer the Sun.
And of course, a comet accelerates as it comes towards the Sun
having spent most of its life out in the cold distant reaches of...
So out there it acquires, if you like, the electrical capacity of that area?
Yes, because the electric charge in the solar system is very diffuse,
it can't carry much current.
So, in order to, if you like, charge (current) a comet up,
it requires a considerable amount of time
because there's only a very small leakage current, if you like, feeding it all the time.
But the long-period comets, which spend a lot of time out there,
have time to adjust their charge to the environment.
So Halley's Comet, 70 years or so.
Yes, but as they accelerate towards the Sun,
the last part of their orbit (is) would just be in a couple of weeks
and it's switching from the,
its voltage from the outer solar system to one near the Sun,
it begins to discharge, electrically discharge.
So it's like it's got, it's acquired a huge,
in comparison to some, negative potential difference.
- Yes. - It's a cathode
- Yes. - And the Sun is acting as an anode
as it gets close to this, if you like, some sort of discharge starts.
And the kind of discharge that occurs is well known to electrical engineers.
- It's called a cold cathode discharge. - Okay.
You've got a cold body, you haven't heated it to get to boil electrons off
and what happens is that the voltage near the surface rises to the level
where it begins to strip electrons off the atoms.
And then, the next step is; if the discharge intensifies,
it usually intensifies over very small areas
and you get what are called cathode jets and here
you actually get atoms and molecules being stripped off the surface of the body.
Okay, now this is one thing I've discovered about comets,
isn't it that these jets are within the body
and the body itself is rather solid, not unlike an asteroid?
Is that one of the things that really...
That's correct, yeah.
The story was, of course, that comets were leftover
materials from the birth of the solar system
which meant that it was dust and ices mixed together.
Well, they call the body sort of dusty iceballs? That's right.
And that's actually not true?
No, no, I mean, every photograph that's been taken of, closeup of a comet nucleus
shows that it looks like solid rock.
Yeah. And if it looks like solid rock, it probably is.
That's, yeah. The first thing to do is to use your observations and use that as your guide,
not make up the story to fit your theory.
Stay tuned for part 2