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Our solar system is unusual in many ways and one of the strangest features is the
asteroid belt. Mainstream science will tell you that these are just the
remnants of the formation process of the solar system. Jupiter is said to have halted the
formation of a body in its zone. Others have speculated that this was the
remains of a destroyed planet. Velikovsky felt Venus was a newly-formed
body that had been ejected from Jupiter. Venus at this stage was like a comet
with a large tail. When Mars clashed with Venus, asteroids, meteorites, and gases
were torn from the trailing part of Venus and began a semi-independent existence,
some following the orbit of Mars and some other parts. The Electric Universe would build on
this concept but would place the origin of Venus in Saturn, not in Jupiter. It
therefore stands to reason that these asteroids hold the clues to
understanding what might have happened to our solar system in the past. Vesta
is one of the largest objects in the asteroid belt, second only behind Ceres.
It has a diameter of 326 miles. Its mass constitutes a staggering nine percent of
the mass of the Asteroid Belt. It is also the brightest asteroid that is visible
from Earth. It was first discovered back in 1802 by Heinrich Olbers.
He proposed that these two objects (Ceres and Vesta) were the remnants of a destroyed planet.
Vesta's density is lower than those of the four terrestrial planets, but higher
than most of the asteroids and all of the moons in the solar system, except Io.
In 2011, Nasa's Dawn mission arrived to study the asteroid.
In 2012, an analysis of its shape and gravitational field concluded that it
was not in hydrostatic equilibrium. They speculated that it has a more dense core at the center.
Vesta has been identified as the source of a very common class of meteorite
which makes up about six percent of the meteorites which fall to Earth. It boasts
some remarkable features across its surface. One of the largest is the Rheasilvia
basin which almost rivals Olympus Mons in terms of height.
And this is located on the southern pole. Astronomers believe that an impact was
responsible for excavating about one percent of the volume of Vesta and
producing the smaller fragments that rained down on Earth.
The crater itself looks like no other crater I have ever seen, but we will
return to this point in a little while. All over the surface there is evidence
of scarring; many of these so-called craters have sharp edges with no spray
marks and are more likely indicative of electrical etching, where material is
removed from the surface during repeated discharges. If you look at the entire surface, you
will start to notice what looks like troughs running across the entire length
of the asteroid. These have presented astronomers with quite a mystery. Some
have speculated that they might be the remnants of a cataclysmic impact. When
you examine the location of these troughs, they do seem to ring around two massive craters.
Now astronomers usually try and date features by a process called crater counting.
Here the assumption is that the craters will occur randomly. Older surfaces would
therefore have been hit more often than younger ones and will therefore display
more scars. But when they examined the craters on Vesta, they found that there
wasn't enough information to solidly determine how the basin and troughs were
related to each other. This means that they cannot conclusively link the age of
either crater to the age of the troughs. When we examine the images of both poles of Vesta,
something rather remarkable stands out immediately. They simply do not look like
craters at all. In the south pole we see the elevated part off-center in the basin.
All around the basin the land is higher with what appears as a much sharper ridge to the right.
All along the left and leading both the top and bottom, we see marks that, if this
was a much larger body, would be interpreted as erosion due to water flow.
Yet, there is no flowing water on Vesta, nor has there ever been any. Further out,
to the upper right-hand side are the trench lines that encircle about three quarters of the area.
These features and their connection are really not as obvious when you examine
individual images on the surface. Now many of you will recognize these
types of features from Mars, where electrical scarring reshaped the landscape.
Here we seem to have uncovered a relic like no others. Here are examples of dome craters. The
southern, and to a lesser extent, the northern basin, has very clear rampart edges.
Slightly off-center, in the southern basin, we also find the peak which is not
visible in the northern hemisphere. More remarkable is the river-like shapes
that seem to fan away and towards the central basin. They are very reminiscent
of those found on Mars and also Earth, although in the latter case most now
contain water in the form of rivers, hiding their origin from view.
The other pole on Vesta also contains some very strange land features, none
more striking than what appears as large areas which are very smooth. They are located
around, and inside many of the large craters. We also see examples of dome craters,
which is a clear sign of electrical discharge. So how can we account for all
of these phenomena at once? Electrical discharge experiments readily
produce craters with central peaks. Wal Thornhill envisions that twin Birkeland
filaments, rotating around each other, would create the dished peaks.
The large basin also has sides that appear on three of the sides to be hexagonal
with a large distortion appearing on the left-hand side of the basin. Hexagonal
edges are observed in some plasma experiments, but also in examples like the north pole
of Saturn. All the scarring we see probably stems from the event that caused its creation.
If there was a large discharge between two large bodies in the solar system,
this is likely to have excavated material from the surface of one of them.
This is the origin of the asteroid belt. These boulders and dust would have been
torn away from the parent body. In the near-vacuum of space, the large discharge
would have structured according to Don Scott's model, with a series of concentric shells,
with smallerfilaments within each of these, as we saw in Peratt's experiments.
Now I'll be honest, explaining all of these features at once is extremely difficult.
But here are four possible ways that we could explain all of the features as we see on Vesta.
The first one, a body the size of Vesta would act as a focus for a Birkeland
current, due to the presence of a high density of charged particles.
In this case a discharge would tend to pinch in at Vesta. At a certain threshold the discharge
beam would start to break up into smaller vortex-like current bundles
and these will tend to pinch at the surface of the asteroid, causing the
material to be etched away. The ridges along the equator might be
caused by discharges that occur from the equator, out to the first shell of the Birkeland current.
An alternative explanation is that a discharge occurred directly onto Vesta. If we assume the
asteroid had a spinbefore the discharge and that the removal of material from one pole would
alter the stability of the spin axis and might cause an effect similar to the
tennis racket theorem, where the instability of one of the three axes of
rotation can cause the object to flip over, and then back in rapid succession.
Could this account for both poles being etched? Examining the surface features, we see
spiral marks in the northern pole region. Are these caused by etching as Vesta
turned over from one side to the other? Did the filaments then break down even
further, leading to much sharper and smaller etching lines on the southern
hemisphere? Was enough material then etched out of the southern pole to
stabilize the rotation, stopping a further flip? The third possibility is something
called cathode spots. Now an electrical comet acts as a cathode and the Sun acts
as an anode, and the assumption is that comets are essentially more negative in
relation to the object like the Sun. Could Vesta have become more negative
and less positive with respect to a nearby highly charged body such as Venus?
If this is true then it discharged to the surface similar to the first one
that we discussed, and then a phenomenon, called cathode spots, could explain some
of the etching marks that we see along the equator of Vesta. As the material was excavated during the
discharge, fine dust would be ejected around Vesta, which would be partially ionized. This
plasma forms a ring around the equator. This is inherently unstable and causes
the formation of cathode spots, or short-duration arcs to the surface.
These melt the surface material. They ionize it and produce dense plasma with
copious electrons which can in turn enhance the cathode emissions further.
These energized electrons form a highly conducting plasma channel to the first
cylinder of the larger discharge channel. These arc discharges often create the
form of grooves pitted out of the surface of the cathode. The last
possibility is slightly more radical. Now some of you will be familiar with a
series that I created showing Anthony Peratt's concept of how galaxies form in a plasma universe.
What he discovered was that plasma sheets tend to break down into filaments,
which in turn tend to pair up and wrap around each other. There was a delicate balance between the
repulsion of like charges at short range and the long-range attraction due to the
magnetic field each filament created. This means that as the two filaments
approached, an area is created between the two filaments where local material,
which is not part of the filament, gets compressed. In Peratt's model, this
central area would eventually form the galaxy. What if an ongoing discharge
between two larger bodies was ejecting material and dust into the
surrounding space? The discharge channel was becoming unstable and breaking down
into smaller filaments, which in turn started to spiral around each other.
Could this actually compress the material between the filaments back into a sphere?
Peratt described the compression area as being similar to those conditions that
Eric Lerner had tested in his laboratory using a dense plasma focus device.
Could this environment lead to secondary discharges that etched out the marks that we see?
Now Peratt was very clear that he felt there were no jets that would exist from
the core to the two filaments. Instead, he saw these as plasma bridges that,
depending on the viewing angle, would look like jets. But it was also clear that he did not
model the core in his simulations. So what we see as just large asteroids,
actually contain many secrets that help us to try and reconstruct the
circumstances under which they formed. The more we examine these lumps of rock,
the more that they reveal about the cataclysmic electrical events that have shaped our past.
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