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The French author Marcel Proust once stated,
"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes
but in having new eyes."
In 2017, the journey of space discovery demands new eyes
and indeed an entirely new way of perceiving our universe.
In our own celestial neighborhood in our solar system
no type of object consistently provokes greater surprise and perplexity than the comet.
As we've reported in recent episodes,
no reasonable debate can remain that the more than half century old
dirty snowball hypothesis of comets is falsified.
Every comet mission to date has refuted the consensus belief
that comets are fluffy aggregates of ice and dust
that condensed or accreted billions of years ago
out in the "Siberia" of the solar system.
Comet nuclei are not icy or snowy.
They are desiccated, rocky bodies that appear virtually
indistinguishable from asteroids.
Comet activity, including powerful jets and the production of the cometary tail and coma,
cannot be the result of sublimating volatiles and outgassing,
a fact that only grows more evident with each new discovery.
A new image released in the last week by the European Space Agency's Rosetta team
underscores the desperate need for new theoretical pathways in comet science.
Here we see one of the clearest, perhaps undeniable, images to date
of an electrical discharge on a comet nucleus.
The image was taken on July 3rd, 2016, by the Rosetta spacecraft at comet 67P.
At the time, the comet was at a distance of about 500 million kilometers from the Sun,
a distance at which astronomers do not expect sublimation
of invisible hypothetical water ice.
The lead author of a new scientific paper on the observation states,
"We saw a bright plume of dust, blowing away from the surface like a fountain...
It lasted for roughly an hour,
producing around 18 kg of dust every second."
The team admits they have no idea what mechanism could have actually powered
the so-called plume.
The ESA's website states,
"Initially, scientists thought that the plume might have been surface ice evaporating in the sunlight.
However, Rosetta's measurements showed there had to be something more energetic going on
to fling that amount of dust into space."
The lead author states,
"Energy must have been released from beneath the surface to power it.
There are evidently processes in comets that we do not yet fully understand."
The understatement of this comment cannot be overemphasized.
As we see in this side-by-side image comparison,
the structure of the so-called plume has its ideal analog
in the form of an electrical discharge in the laboratory.
The electrical nature of this type of cometary phenomena
has been self-evident since long before the Rosetta mission.
In 2004, when the Stardust spacecraft arrived at the comet Wild 2,
scientists were astonished by the comet's explosive jets
some of which emanated from the dark unheated side of the asteroid-like nucleus.
Principal investigator Donald Brownlee said in 2004,
"We thought comet Wild 2 would be like a dirty, black, fluffy snowball.
Instead, it was mind-boggling to see the diverse landscape in the first pictures from Stardust,
including spires, pits and craters, which must be supported by a cohesive surface."
Nothing in the behavior of the comet's jets fit investigators' expectations.
Stardust investigator Dr. Benton Clark stated,
"Another big surprise was the abundance and behavior of jets of particles
shooting up from the comet's surface.
We expected a couple of jets,
but saw more than two dozen in the brief flyby."
A June 17, 2004, NASA report described the conundrum,
"The team predicted the jets would shoot up for a short distance,
and then be dispersed into a halo around Wild 2.
Instead, some super-speedy jets remained intact,
like blasts of water from a powerful garden hose."
Of course, a garden hose is a completely inappropriate analogy
for such explosive jets in the "vacuum of space".
As we've discussed in many recent episodes,
astronomers have sometimes used the same terminology
in their attempts to explain light-years long stellar and galactic jets.
The question is,
what mechanism confines the jets and prevents their dispersal?
On 67P, the merging filaments within the collimated jets reveal a vital clue,
as seen in the side-by-side comparison with a plasma discharge in the laboratory.
Radio astronomers have now measured the electric currents in galactic jets
which produce tremendous velocities
and confine the jetted material up to many hundreds of thousands of light-years.
If comet jets and plumes are also electrical discharge phenomena,
as the Electric Universe model has always predicted,
the mystery of the velocity and confinement of the jets is resolved.
Another problem for comet scientists is that the hypothetical apertures,
required for the collimation of material that is supposedly outgassed from a comet
or the "nozzle" from which a hypothetical garden hose would release its stream,
have not been seen on comet nuclei.
This problem is acknowledged in the paper
"Cometary Jet Collimation Without Physical Confinement"
published in the 2012 fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union.
It states,
"Contemporary models postulate that these jets collimate
when the expanding gases and dust pass through a physical aperture or nozzle.
However, recent high-resolution spacecraft observations
fail to detect such apertures on cometary surfaces.
Recent high-resolution images of comet nuclei reveal that the gas and dust
expelled by the comet is organized into narrow plumes or jets..."
"Furthermore, these models do not explain why cometary jets
appear to be directed normal to the local gravitational potential.
This is especially puzzling because the jet velocity,
typically 300 m/sec far from the comet,
greatly exceeds the escape velocity of only about 1 m/sec."
As we've also recently reported, it could not be more clear
that dramatic comet activity has nothing to do with sublimating ices.
Scientists using NASA's Hubble Telescope
have detected unprecedented activity from the comet C/2017 K2
at a billion and a half miles from the Sun
or 16 astronomical units (AU).
Comet water-ice ceases to sublimate beyond just a few AU.
The scientists can only propose that the comet must have been recently
"gravitationally kicked out of the Oort cloud"
and is therefore covered with pristine hyper-volatiles,
surface ices of methane, carbon monoxide and/or nitrogen
that might sublimate at such a distance.
Such attempts to cling to discredited theory
grow more disturbing with each new discovery.
The electric theory of comets has successfully predicted
the extraordinary geology of comet nuclei
and the completely unexpected findings of comet activity
at great varieties of distances from the Sun.
The bright, so-called, plume on 67P can be seen as an electrical discharge
resulting from an explosive redistribution of charge on the comet nucleus.
Neither an imaginary reservoir of subsurface ice
nor theoretical nozzles from which outgassing supposedly sprays like a garden hose
will ever account for this type of remarkable cometary phenomena.
The Rosetta mission and other spectacular voyages in space discovery
represent remarkable technical achievements and yet, tragically,
they are also enormous missed opportunities.
Before seeking out new landscapes to explore
comet scientist must see with new eyes which might perceive a self-evident truth,
comets and the universe in which they exist are electric.
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