- "Comets are perhaps at once the most spectacular
and the least well understood members of the solar system." -- M.
Neugebauer, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
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- The more facts we gather about comets the less sense
they make under popular scientific theories about comets. Highly energetic
and focused jets explode from comets' nuclei and scar them with features
similar to those on asteroids and satellites. The jets' filamentary structures
stretch across millions of miles. The apparent temperatures of comas are
so high that x-rays and extreme ultraviolet light shine from them. Water
and other volatiles are in short supply or are completely absent on the
surfaces of many comet nuclei. Observed electrical transactions with the
solar wind remain obscure to cometologists. And a perplexing number of
comets mysteriously explode as they dart around the sun.
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- Though the popular theories have hardened into dogma
and the scientific media present them as facts, the new discoveries challenge
the popular assumptions. The metaphor of a "dirty snowball" does
not fit what we know about comets in the space age. A vast library of data
now contradicts the standard assumption of an electrically neutral comet
in an electrically neutral solar system. It is no longer useful to ignore
the electrical properties of plasma.
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- Astronomers have calculated the mass and density of comets
from the effects they have on the trajectories of various spacecraft. By
this reasoning comet Halley's nucleus had a density of only 0.1 to 0.25
that of water. But such conclusions are immediately invalidated if comets
are electrically charged bodies moving through an electric field of the
Sun. Where charged bodies interact across a plasma medium, all common assumptions
about gravity become suspect.
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- Most larger comet nuclei do not exceed one billionth
of the mass of Earth. Hence, even under the standard assumptions, a comet's
gravity is insufficient to do the things that comet investigators, confronted
with new surprises, ask it to do. Consider the surface of Comet Wild 2,
for example.
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- When they first saw the pictures of the comet, a number
of scientists declared that the craters were the result of impacts. But
a small rock will not attract impactors, and in view of the emptiness of
space, even in the hypothetical "planet-forming nebula" stage,
it is inconceivable that such a small body could have been subjected to
enough projectiles to cover it, end to end, with craters. Nor is it plausible
to imagine a melting snowball or iceberg retaining such impact structures
from primordial times. Sublimating ice quickly loses its distinctive features.
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- Some astronomers suggested that the craters were sinkholes,
formed when surface material fell into cavities left by the sublimation
of volatiles. But is it reasonable to ask the minuscule gravity of a comet
nucleus to produce "sinkholes" in this fashion?
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- The frequent erratic motions of comets -- in apparent
violation of gravitational laws -- have long been attributed to the "jets"
seen erupting from the nucleus. The distinguished astronomer Fred Whipple
first suggested that jets from comets could account for unpredictable motions.
As summarized by Francis Reddy in an obituary the day after Whipple's death
in 2004, the astronomer believed that "The jets supply a force that
can either speed or slow a comet, depending on the way it rotates -- a
force unaccounted for in the astronomical calculations used in predicting
comet returns".
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- As Comet Linear moved toward perihelion, a NASA release
stated, "powerful jets of gas vaporized by solar radiation have been
pushing the comet to and fro". Astronomers applied the same interpretation
to the energetic jets of Borrelly and Wild 2. But in the case of Wild 2
(see link above), the close-up photographs gave no indication of caverns
in which selective heating by the Sun could build up the pressures of "jet
chambers" or produce the sonic and supersonic jet velocities our instruments
have measured. And yet today, the astronomers' dogma holds: "What
else could these jets be"? To save the theory astronomers cling to
the incredible.
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- From an electric viewpoint there is no enigma in these
comet attributes. The jets are not released under pressure but are created
by electric arcs to the surface, and it is these arcs that carve out the
surface craters. The jets do not explode from hidden areas within the nucleus.
In the best photos ever of a comet, Wild 2 (link above), no such caverns
are evident. Rather, we see hot spots on high points and on the rims of
shallow, flat-bottomed craters.
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- By now it should be obvious that something more than
gravity is at work in the behavior of comets. Since a comet holds a highly
negative charge, it attracts the positively charged particles of the solar
wind, giving rise to an immense envelope of ionized hydrogen, up to millions
of miles across. But the comet watchers do not realize that this vast envelope
is gathered and held electrically. And so the question continues to haunt
them: How could a tiny piece of rock, no more than a few miles wide, gravitationally
entrain and hold in place a ten million mile wide bubble of hydrogen against
the force of the solar wind? Yes, the entrained envelope is extremely diffuse,
but in gravitational terms it should not be there!
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- If the electric theorists are correct, there is no mystery
in the gravity-defying behavior of comets. A gravitationally insignificant
rock on a highly elliptical orbit can be an electrically powerful object.
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