Comet – Asteroid Link Confirmed


“The remarkable properties of comets are not even remotely explicable by any of the numerous ad hoc assumptions of ‘modern’ comet theory.”
— R A Lyttleton, FRS, Journey to the Centre of Uncertainty, Speculations in Science & Technology.

From the Stardust mission, a heart-shaped comet particle extracted from aerogel.
Heart-shaped comet particle extracted from aerogel.

Further support for the predictive power of the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model comes from NASA’s Stardust mission to comet Wild 2 and the discovery that the comet is made of “rocky material, like an asteroid.” This has been a cornerstone of the reconstruction of the recent history of the solar system by using all of the forensic evidence available to us. This method is quite distinct from the theoretical approach adopted by conventional astronomers and astrophysicists who try to imagine how things were in the beginning and then work forward in time concocting ad hoc events as required in an attempt to match what we see today. The ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® investigation shows that the solar system has changed drastically within the short span of intelligent humankind on this Earth. Such sharp discontinuities render the theoretical approach worthless.

Plasma cosmology shows that stars are born in a galactic electrical discharge event involving the powerful electromagnetic “Z-pinch” effect. Gravity can be ignored. Companion stars and gas giant planets are born later as the Z-pinch subsides and the new stars adjust to their changing electrical environment by expelling matter from their cores. That explains the apparent anomaly of “hot Jupiters” found closely orbiting nearby stars. Sometime later again, in achieving orbital stability through electrical encounters with other planetary bodies, gas giants may expel matter from within to form companion moons and rings. Some of that matter escapes the parent to form planetary, asteroidal, cometary and meteoroidal bodies.

In the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model it is futile to look for remnants of the primordial gas and dust from which the solar system is supposed to have collapsed. Comets are not primordial composites. The matter in comets (and asteroids and meteoroids) has been through several processes, first in a star, then within a gas giant and possibly a rocky planet before being discharged into space. The same discharge that gives birth to these small bodies may burn them black and leave distinctive birthmarks in the form of large arc craters. That is how asteroids, like Mathilde, can be covered in gigantic craters without suffering any disruption.

With this model in mind, it is instructive to compare excerpts from two popular scientific reports followed with earlier predictions of the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE®.


From the NewScientist.com news service, 24 January 2008:

Comet samples are surprisingly asteroid-like

By David Shiga

Samples of Comet Wild 2 suggest it is made of rocky material, like an asteroid, rather than the fluffy dust expected of a comet. The object may be a refugee that formed in the asteroid belt before getting kicked to the chilly fringes of the solar system, or it might have formed in that frigid realm from material thrown out of the inner solar system, scientists say.

NASA’s Stardust mission swung by comet Wild 2 in 2004 to capture particles shed by the 5-kilometre object and returned them to Earth in 2006. Since then, scientists have been carefully analysing the microscopic fragments it collected.
Early on, scientists found surprising evidence that Wild 2 contained some material from the inner solar system that had been heated to more than 1000° C due to its proximity to the Sun.

Now, scientists have been surprised again as further study suggests Wild 2 is made mostly of material from the inner solar system, and that the object has a composition more like that of an asteroid than what was expected of a comet. The conclusion comes from a study led by Hope Ishii of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, US.”

“Stardust chief scientist Don Brownlee of the University of Washington in Seattle, US, who was not involved in the study, says he agrees with its main conclusion. “Probably most of the mass of the comet is actually inner solar system material that was carried out from the inner solar system to the outside,” he told New Scientist.

‘Asteroid-like comet’

The picture that emerges is that Wild 2 appears to be “kind of an asteroid-like comet”, Ishii told New Scientist. Wild 2 may have formed in the outer solar system from material that had drifted there from the inner solar system, she says. Alternatively, the object itself could have formed closer to the Sun and then migrated outwards later, she says.

Wild 2 should still be considered a comet, she adds, because it is throwing off gas and dust as ice on its surface evaporates in sunlight. But she says the new findings bolster the view that there is no sharp dividing line between comets and asteroids. “This is a good indication that there is a continuum between asteroids and comets,” she says.

Some objects in the outer asteroid belt have been dubbed ‘outer belt comets’, because they contain a lot of ice that sometimes produces tails when it evaporates in the Sun’s heat. And some objects in the outer solar system beyond Neptune appear to be rocky in composition, like asteroids, says co-author John Bradley, also of Lawrence Livermore.


And in Science magazine of 25 January 2008, comes the following report from Richard A. Kerr:

Where Has All the Stardust Gone?

Surprise has followed surprise for cosmochemists analyzing the dust sample that the Stardust spacecraft returned from comet Wild 2 in January 2006. First, they found tiny flecks of once molten minerals—material very different from the raw, primordial dust they expected to see. Such unaltered, so-called presolar material was the prime ingredient of the rocky planets and was thought to abound in icy comets. But researchers report that they have failed to find a single speck of it.

“For those of us who study presolar materials, it’s turned out to be a bit of a bust,” says cosmochemist Larry R. Nittler of the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Department of Terrestrial Magnetism in Washington, D.C. “Wild 2 seems more related to asteroids than comets,” because all asteroids were altered from the solar system’s primitive starting materials. Still, “the mission’s been a huge success,” says John Bradley of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in California, a co-author of the Science paper. “It’s changing the way we think about comets.”

All in all, “it’s looking as if Wild 2 is more like an asteroid than a primitive comet,” says Ishii. Brownlee agrees. Rather than preserving the original ingredients of planets, comets—or at least Wild 2—seem to be loaded with materials first altered by the great heat near the young sun, he says. Then those altered materials must have been carried outward to the outer reaches of the nebula, where comets incorporated them. “I would say a large fraction of the [outermost] nebular materials were probably transported there” from much nearer the sun, Brownlee says, “which is pretty amazing.” Now, no one is at all sure where the solar system’s lingering primitive materials might reside.


Comment: It is clear from statements like those above that the thinking about comets is not going to change sensibly while the basic assumptions of astronomers about the formation of the solar system remain unquestioned. As usual, a number of post hoc, and ad hoc ideas have had to be added to a theory that doesn’t work — the gravitational accretion theory of formation of the solar system.


The Comet — Asteroid Link in the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE®

I first wrote on this subject in a paper for the UK Society for Interdisciplinary Studies Chronology and Catastrophism Review 1988, Vol. X, titled, “Formation of Chondritic Meteorites and the Solar System”:

According to [the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE®] scenario, comets, asteroids and meteorites have a common origin. It is not assumed that these bodies have anything to do with a highly problematical primordial solar nebula. Therefore, for example, the ‘Oort Shell’ hypothesis of comets surrounding the Solar System is considered an unnecessary fiction. Indeed, Professor Ray Lyttleton described the Oort Shell theory as ‘a piece of trash.’

Professor S. Vsekhsviatskii, Director of the Kiev Observatory and Head of the Faculty of Astronomy, University of Kiev, has concluded from his studies of comets that:

i). Celestial mechanics, the distribution and statistics of cometary orbits, and consideration of the kinematics of the cometary system leave no doubt whatsoever that all comets, and therefore the products of their decay, were formed inside the Solar System, and were formed a little later, on the average, than were the planets.

ii). The existence of the families of short-period comets of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and the peculiarities of their motion and nature – their chemistry, the presence of ice in their nuclei, their close association with Jupiter prior to discovery, etc. – demonstrates the recent origin of comets.

This is in accord with the theory of the eruptive development of planets, as developed by Lagrange, Proctor, Crommelin and Vsekhsviatskii. Recent, comprehensive investigations by Everhart (1969) confirmed once more that peculiarities of the observed distribution of short-period comet orbits cannot be explained on the basis of the ‘gravitational capture’ hypothesis. Indeed, Fred Whipple in his recent book, The Mystery of Comets, writes:

‘A plot of the orbits of the short-period comets projected on the plane of Jupiter’s orbit shows a remarkable clustering. The ring of their aphelion curves outlines Jupiter’s orbit beautifully. The conclusion has been clear for more than a century! Jupiter’s huge attractive mass has somehow collected two-thirds of all the short-period comets into a family.’ [emphasis added]
On March 7, 1979, Voyager 1 unexpectedly discovered a faint ring of dark rocky debris circling the planet Jupiter. In the words of Dr Bradford A. Smith, head of the Voyager photography team; ‘Now Jupiter is found to have a ring and we must invent a theory to explain it.’

Two months after the discovery of the ring around Jupiter, the Soviet Union claimed joint credit for the discovery, contending that Vsekhsviatskii had predicted the ring’s existence as early as 1960 in a journal called Izvestia of the Armenian Academy of Sciences. The passage from the relevant paper is as follows:

‘The existence of active ejection processes in the Jupiter system, demonstrated by comet astronomy, gives grounds for assuming that Jupiter is encircled by comet and meteorite material in the form of a ring similar to the ring of Saturn.’

Despite the fact of his priority, Vsekhsviatskii’s name has remained conspicuously absent from the scientific literature pertaining to comets and planetary rings. Given that mathematicians seem to be the final arbiter on astronomical theory in this age, it is not surprising that Vsekhsviatskii’s work has been ignored because they immediately calculated that the energy required to explosively erupt matter from Jupiter would be sufficient to totally atomise the ejected material. A more scientific approach would have been to examine his promising findings and consider other mechanisms.

In the event, it has been left to two astronomers [C. E. R. Bruce and Eric Crew] with a particular interest in electric discharge phenomena to propose a promising ejection mechanism which may explain the features of comets and meteorites.

… T. van Flandern has proposed the formation of comets, meteorites, asteroids and tektites from the explosion of a larger former planet in the Solar System by some unknown mechanism. He shows how many anomalies in the characteristics of our solar system may be simply explained by such an event. The stratification of chondritic types within the asteroid belt certainly indicates at least four separate events in that region of the Solar System. The differences in composition of meteorites from those regions may be diagnostic of the parent bodies.

It should be remembered that all of the giant planets have ephemeral ring systems, which by this theory are indicative of past expulsion of matter. Saturn’s rings would appear to be the most recent.

“… Conclusion and Implications

The electric discharge hypothesis appears to offer, for the first time, the possibility of an explanation for all of the peculiar features of chondrites. By extension it offers a more plausible mechanism for the creation of asteroids, comets, moons, planets, planetary rings, and companion stars than does the nebular hypothesis. It follows that the history of the Solar System has been one of continual evolution rather than creation, roughly as we see it now, from a nebula 5 billion years ago followed by relative peace since that event.”


And from Comet Borrelly rocks core scientific beliefs, 18 October 2001.

“..there is no difference between the appearance of a comet nucleus and an asteroid. One schizoid object, Chiron, has been called both an asteroid and a comet at different times. Yet asteroids are thought to be much more evolved bodies than comets. The ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® proposes that their origin is identical and that a cometary display is due entirely to highly eccentric motion of a charged body in the radial electric field of the Sun.”


Also from Comet Wild 2, 06 January 2004:

And how does the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model fit this picture?

‘The ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® model of comets has a simple, coherent explanation for all of the features and behavior of comets.

‘Comets are not leftovers from the formation of the solar system. Present theories of the formation of planetary systems cannot explain our solar system anyway.

‘Just as there is no invisible dark matter required in the galaxy to save the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® theory, there is no invisible Oort cloud of comets required to provide a theoretical comet source. In the ELECTRIC UNIVERSE® – what you see is all you need.

‘Comets are the result of electrical discharge machining of planetary bodies that occurs in the catastrophic evolution of planetary orbits. It is far too simplistic to assume that the planets were formed along with the Sun and remained in their present orbits ever since.

‘In addition to removing dust, the gargantuan electric forces of an interplanetary thunderbolt are able to loft entire mountains into space from the surface of a planet. Comets and asteroids can be formed this way.

‘And the same discharge that gives birth to comets and asteroids may burn them black and leave distinctive birthmarks in the form of large arc craters. That is how asteroids, like Mathilde, can be covered in gigantic craters without suffering any disruption.

‘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.

 

On 14 March 2006, I wrote in Stardust Comet Fragments Solar System Theory:

“NASA researchers announced on March 13 another in the long procession of surprises about comets. The grains from comet Wild 2, trapped in aerogel and returned to Earth, were much larger than expected and made from the same high-temperature minerals as found in the most abundant meteorites. This discovery was so unexpected that an early sample was thought to be contamination from the spacecraft.

Once again, rather than revisiting the assumptions about the origin of comets, NASA scientists introduced another ad hoc addition to comet theory. Now the Sun must somehow eject material from inside Mercury’s orbit into the far reaches beyond Pluto’s orbit where it somehow accretes to form comets. The word ‘somehow’ is overworked to death in comet theory.

..If successful predictions are a hallmark of a good theory, standard comet theory rates nowhere.”

“Now we have the evidence, delivered to Earth directly from a comet. They are made from the same minerals we find in meteorites and asteroids. They are composed of rocky, planetary material. They are not primordial.”


Wal Thornhill

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