The Electric Comet theory

[Haig]

So Haig, read this post:
http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showpost.php?p=6580051&postcount=711

Do you deny that you made this statement?

No, I clearly said that.

Let me say it again. Mainstream only consider two causes of craters i.e. volcanism and impact, as far as I know.

In the case of comets and asteroids volcanism is ruled out, again as far as I know and that seems obvious as to why, right?.

Only EU/PC theory consider a third cause, that of electrical discharge. http://www.thunderbolts.info/tpod/00subjectx.htm#Craters

Your other points puzzle me and I'll let them pass but I would like to hear you state the "other" causes of circular craters on comets or asteroids DD

 

[Dancing David]

Haig,
You made the statement again, the burden is on you to show that your statement about mainstream cometary theories is accurate. Thundebolts is not mainstream and you still haven't shown a mainstream source that agree that there are only two ways that craters form on comets.

That is your burden, you say it is so, I am asking for the evidence. I suggested three other candidates.

 

[Haig]

Haig,
You made the statement again, the burden is on you to show that your statement about mainstream cometary theories is accurate. Thundebolts is not mainstream and you still haven't shown a mainstream source that agree that there are only two ways that craters form on comets.

That is your burden, you say it is so, I am asking for the evidence. I suggested three other candidates.

If you accept Wiki as mainstream ;-)
It's clear they choose between volcanic craters or impact, there is no third choice for mainstream. and as far as I know impact craters are the default theory unless there is an obvious volcanism cause.

Identifying impact craters (it's about halfway down)

Non-explosive volcanic craters can usually be distinguished from impact craters by their irregular shape and the association of volcanic flows and other volcanic materials.

Could you state again those .....

suggested three other candidates

..... of yours,I seem to have missed them

 

[Tubbythin]

As I said in this post

“All I see with asteroids and comets are lumps of rocks in various shapes and sizes, pock-marked with craters. Most are circular! What are the odds of that?

From what I've just read after a two second search on google, the possibility of any given impact crater being approximately circular is around 8/9, so highly likely.

Random impacts should give a random angle of impact. Where are all the glancing blows and oblique craters?”

Impacts from 10 to 170 degrees give circular craters because the shock waves spread out hemispherically from the point of impact. By the way, you do know that impact craters are much larger than the impact that created them right?

So RC, where ARE the glancing blows

and oblique craters like these?

There are probably a few but these only occur at extremely small angles of impact so are rare.

You say it’s explained by high-energy impacts that tend to leave circular craters. Have you any evidence for that, showing the distinct OTHER features of the craters we see?

What do you mean have you any evidence for that? Most large craters are fairly hemi-spherical aren't they? Anyway why don't you do some calculations?
Besides high-energy impactors make larger craters (this should be obvious unless you think the crater has a similar radius to the impactor) so we have the obvious result from the mainstream model (which at no point did you even bother to check):
a) The biggest impact craters are the most easy to see;
b) The biggest craters are made by the highest energy impactors;
c) Most high energy impactors leave circular craters;
d) Therefore, from a), b) & c), most impact craters should be spherical.

And why wouldn’t high-energy impacts of relatively large craters shatter “low density” smallish comets?

High-energy impacts of large crater??? You mean large impactors? And who said the impactors needed to be that big?

 

[Dancing David]

If you accept Wiki as mainstream ;-)
It's clear they choose between volcanic craters or impact, there is no third choice for mainstream. and as far as I know impact craters are the default theory unless there is an obvious volcanism cause.

Identifying impact craters (it's about halfway down)

So a page on impact craters is about cometary bodies. Long stretch there Haig.

Why don't you really try to defend your statement? like by going and reading some mainstream astronomy? The you can really say what they say about craters on comets.

[/URL]
Could you state again those ..... ..... of yours,I seem to have missed them

Sublimation, out gassing, subsidence.

I think you will find that only Thunderbolts is saying that about mainstream theory of comets.

Now about that electrical fields that is so small it won't arc?

 

[Tubbythin]

I haven't said that DD. From what i've read, mainstream use either volcanism or impact to explain craters generally,but for small bodies like comets or asteroids only impacts makes sense to them. PC/EU theory gives another possibility for the cause, that of EDM which explains the frequency of circular craters very well as well as the other odd feature's that baffle mainstream.

Seriously, where did you get this idea that circular craters baffle the mainstream? Are these other features that baffle the mainstream similarly unbaffling?

 

[Haig]

From what I've just read after a two second search on google, the possibility of any given impact crater being approximately circular is around 8/9, so highly likely.

Impacts from 10 to 170 degrees give circular craters because the shock waves spread out hemispherically from the point of impact. By the way, you do know that impact craters are much larger than the impact that created them right?

There are probably a few but these only occur at extremely small angles of impact so are rare.

What do you mean have you any evidence for that? Most large craters are fairly hemi-spherical aren't they? Anyway why don't you do some calculations?
Besides high-energy impactors make larger craters (this should be obvious unless you think the crater has a similar radius to the impactor) so we have the obvious result from the mainstream model (which at no point did you even bother to check):
a) The biggest impact craters are the most easy to see;
b) The biggest craters are made by the highest energy impactors;
c) Most high energy impactors leave circular craters;
d) Therefore, from a), b) & c), most impact craters should be spherical.

High-energy impacts of large crater??? You mean large impactors? And who said the impactors needed to be that big?

Thanks for your input Tubbythin. Wish I had the time to delve in to all the good points you raised but I don't. You haven't convinced me, just yet, that small bodies such as comets and asteroids should have so few glancing blows and oblique impacts but I expect you don't rate the electrical discharge cause of circular craters either, or do you?

How would you explain bull’s-eye craters or crater Herschel on Mimas or two “impact” craters side by side, both with central peaks terminating in craters? EU/PC can explain these very well plus many other strange features of craters we see.

So a page on impact craters is about cometary bodies. Long stretch there Haig.

Best i could do DD. If I had more time.....

Why don't you really try to defend your statement? like by going and reading some mainstream astronomy? The you can really say what they say about craters on comets.

It's really that time thing but if you have any links please post them.

Sublimation, out gassing, subsidence.

Thanks, I did miss those.

Now about that electrical fields that is so small it won't arc?

You mean the electric field that accelerates billions of tons of charged matter away from the strongest gravity around? Coronal Mass Ejections disrupt the flow of the solar wind and produce disturbances that strike the Earth with sometimes catastrophic results. How can the "solar wind" accelerate away to a million miles an hour past the Earth and out past Pluto?

No wonder that comets react so strangely.

 

[Haig]

Seriously, where did you get this idea that circular craters baffle the mainstream? Are these other features that baffle the mainstream similarly unbaffling?

Those are my genuine queries just looking at the pictures of the comet nucleus and asteroids we have seen.

Nothing wrong with being curious, is there?

 

[Tubbythin]

Thanks for your input Tubbythin. Wish I had the time to delve in to all the good points you raised but I don't. You haven't convinced me, just yet, that small bodies such as comets and asteroids should have so few glancing blows and oblique impacts but I expect you don't rate the electrical discharge cause of circular craters either, or do you?

Well, from what I've read, the mainstream says anything above 10 degrees and below 170 will give a circular/hemisphericalish crater. I don't know the precise maths of it but it doesn't particularly surprise me. What more would you like?

How would you explain bull’s-eye craters

From what I've read the sensible explanations are 1) due to the quite different layers at and below the surface and 2) double impact. The latter is obviously improbable for any given crater but with enough craters and enough moons and planets it really isn't all that surprising. It would be interesting to see a much bigger picture of the region to see what the impact density is like.

or crater Herschel on Mimas

That's the death star. More seriously, I'm not sure I understand the problem. Apparently some astronomers thought that such an impact would shatter the moon. Obviously some astronomers were wrong. But if only some thought that then some would not be wrong.

or two “impact” craters side by side, both with central peaks terminating in craters?

I'm not sure what the problem is? Central peaks are common in craters and are well understood by mainstream models. The craters in the middle: subsidence?

EU/PC can explain these very well plus many other strange features of craters we see.

I disagree. EU claims to explain these features very well. I've not seen any quantitative evidence that it can explain them very well.

 

[Tubbythin]

Those are my genuine queries just looking at the pictures of the comet nucleus and asteroids we have seen.

Nothing wrong with being curious, is there?

Being curious about interesting phenomena is definitely a good thing. Claiming that these phenomena baffle the mainstream when a quick search with your favourite search show this is obviously not the case is not a good thing.

 

[Dancing David]

You mean the electric field that accelerates billions of tons of charged matter away from the strongest gravity around? Coronal Mass Ejections disrupt the flow of the solar wind and produce disturbances that strike the Earth with sometimes catastrophic results. How can the "solar wind" accelerate away to a million miles an hour past the Earth and out past Pluto?

No wonder that comets react so strangely.

Yeah that one? The one that causes a mix of neutral, positive and negative ions?

Epic fail Haig.

 

[Haig]

When Asteroids Become Comets

The surprising discovery of asteroids with comet tails supports the longstanding claim of the electrical theorists—that the essential difference between asteroids and comets is the shape of their orbits.

A comet is simply an electrical display and was recognized as such by scientists in the 19th century. So an 'asteroid' on a sufficiently elliptical orbit will do precisely what a comet does—it will discharge electrically. What distinguishes the cometary 'asteroids', observed by the University of Hawaii astronomers, are the paths they follow, moving them through the radial electric field of the Sun to a greater extent than is typical of other bodies in the 'asteroid belt' (See chart above). Cometary effects may also be expected from an asteroid if it passes through the huge electric comet tail [called the magnetosphere] of a giant planet.

 

[ben m]

Yes Ben, its high power phenomena for sure and obviously I don’t have the answers myself but EU/PC theory seems the way forward to me.

If you think that comet-jets are a high power phenomenon, then they cannot be not driven by electrostatic charging/discharging which is inherently a low-power phenomenon.

If you think that electrostatic charging/discharging is a high-power phenomenon, then you must think that Maxwell's Equations are wrong.

 

[ben m]

Let me give you some more actual power numbers, Haig.

The density of the solar wind is about 4 atoms/cm^3. The energy per particle in this wind is about 1000 electron volts or 1.6e-16 Joules.

Take a 1-km^2 comet plowing through this solar wind at 70km/s. How much solar wind power is it crashing into? Um, about two picowatts.

In other words: if the comet were a carefully-tuned electrostatic machine that could take all of the kinetic energies of all the solar-wind particles that hit it, and use all that energy to do something electrical ... well, forget about "discharging" and jets, because this machine doesn't have enough power to run a wristwatch.

As I said: talk all you like about double-layers; account for every plasma detail you can think of; follow every solar-wind ion that interacts with this comet. Even if you get the plasma physics right, that's just a lot of bookkeeping to do for a collection of charges that are delivering a picowatt of power.

Paying attention to that picowatt "seems the way forward" to you? When do you plan on paying attention to the gigawatt of (boring, mainstream) heating power that such a comet gets in the form of light?

 

[Reality Check]

As I said in this post
Random impacts should give a random angle of impact. Where are all the glancing blows and oblique craters?”

You are wrong.
Random impacts do give a random angle of impact. These result in mostly circular craters as explained before.

In my view, a more obvious explanation is this: The Craters Are Electric giving supporting evidence that comets are electric

Then you are wrong. The physical fact rule out that.

Where is the picture of the crater caused by the impactor?
...
The unexpected flash (arc?) and second huge explosion (electrical?) blinded the instruments on Deep Impact preventing the picture of the impact site from being taken, is that right RC?

(fixed your ignorance that the flashes were impact related)
Deep Impact may never glimpse comet crater. (relaized some months before the impact)
The 2 impact flashes saturated some pixels in the instrument for the images taken during the impact.

If you can think, can you give the source on EU/PC sites that say that?

Hint: they don’t!

Hint: I know they do not!
A second hint: I never said that they do!!
A third hint: If someone states a theory then anyone can predict things from it!!!

And so I did: The EC idea fails yet again: Sharply carved relief and comet shapes

 

[Reality Check]

Those are my genuine queries just looking at the pictures of the comet nucleus and asteroids we have seen.

Nothing wrong with being curious, is there?

There is nothing wrong with being curous.

What is wrong is looking at pictures of the comet nucleii and asteroids we have seen, seeing that they look alike (and they do!), assuming that they then must be the same, and then going to a crank website that confirms your prejudice.

What you should have done is look for the physical facts from reliable sources (even Wikipedia!), e.g.

• Comets and asteriods differ in density (~0.6 g/cc for comets, ~3.0 g/cc for asteriods)
• Comets and asteriods differ in composition.
  Comets have enough water, CO2, etc. to form coma and tails, asteroids do not. There are a number of objects that can be considered as both comets and asteriods, e.g. the 5 main-belt comets and centaurs.

What you should have done is think critially about what the crank web site was saying about comets and whether that matched what comets actualy do: The totally stupid electric comet idea that has been debunked!

 

[Reality Check]

The surprising discovery of asteroids with comet tails supports the longstanding claim of the electrical theorists—that the essential difference between asteroids and comets is the shape of their orbits.

More Thunderbolts ignorance: the author obviously does not know that there are many asteroids with comet-like orbits.
This assertion has the fatal flaw of EC predictions - no mathematics or numbers. But we can do their work for them can't we Haig?

The shape of orbits is described by their eccentricity.

There are 5 observed main-belt comets with a minimum eccentricity of 0.1644 (133P/Elst-Pizarro). So the EC minimim must be this (or lower!).

There are at least 173,583 asteroids (rocky bodies) that have an orbit with an eccentricity above that EC minimum value that are not comets. This includes asteroids that have been observed for decades.
There are 459,893 asteroids with eccentricities greater than the minimum observed eccentricity of comets (0.0279).
Also see EC predicts that 100,000's of asteroids should be comets

Good examples of the asteriods that should be comets according to the EC idea are many of the named asteroids:

• Juno (e=0.2553, observed over a span of 67,610 days).
• Pallas (e=0.2309, observed over a span of 64,291 days)
• Astraea (e=0.1917, observed over a span of 59,759 days)
• ...More than 46 other named asteroids observed 1000's of times over decades.
• Vera (e=0.1939, observed over a span of 45,191 days)

 

[Dancing David]

When Asteroids Become Comets

And there are five of these objects, they are all roughly in the same orbits, so out of hundreds of asteroids, why only those five?

Huh, huh , huh?

 

[Haig]

OK Ben, RC and DD can you explain these (my bold):-

Comet coma and tails – dust, ion & sometimes an antitail – why do they stay attached and not dissipate?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Cometorbit.png
http://www.solarviews.com/thumb/comet/comet.gif

antitail
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitail

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comet_Hale-Bopp_1995O1.jpg

Encke's Comet loses its tail
While the solid nucleus of comets is generally less than 50 km (31 mi) across, the coma may be larger than the Sun, and ion tails have been observed to extend one astronomical unit (150 million km) or more.[9] The observation of antitails contributed significantly to the discovery ofsolar wind.[20] The ion tail is formed as a result of the photoelectric effect[dubious – discuss] of solar ultra-violet radiation acting on particles in the coma. Once the particles have been ionized, they attain a net positive electrical charge which in turn gives rise to an "inducedmagnetosphere" around the comet. The comet and its induced magnetic field form an obstacle to outward flowing solar wind particles. As the relative orbital speed of the comet and the solar wind is supersonic, a bow shock is formed upstream of the comet, in the flow direction of the solar wind. In this bow shock, large concentrations of cometary ions (called "pick-up ions") congregate and act to "load" the solar magnetic field with plasma, such that the field lines "drape" around the comet forming the ion tail.[21]

(all seems very electrical to me and a coma larger than the Sun and a tail longer than 1AU)

If the ion tail loading is sufficient, then the magnetic field lines are squeezed together to the point where, at some distance along the ion tail, magnetic reconnection occurs. This leads to a "tail disconnection event".[21] This has been observed on a number of occasions, one notable event recorded on April 20, 2007, when the ion tail of

Encke's Comet was completely severed while the comet passed through a coronal mass ejection

. This event was observed by the STEREO space probe.[22]
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9e/Encke_tail_rip_off.ogg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet

(Seems to me clearly electrical in nature)

 

[Haig]

The Thunderbolts can explain it very well as electric comets


Cometary Filaments

Hale-Bopp, a naked-eye comet that hung for weeks like an exclamation mark in the 1997 sky, was still active four years after it left the inner solar system. When it was farther from the Sun than the orbit of Uranus it was almost two million kilometers in diameter. It displayed a coma, a dust tail, and an ion tail more than a million kilometers long. Solar radiation will not melt ice at that distance, otherwise the moons of Saturn and Jupiter would be bone dry, so astronomers were unable to explain it.

A comet's tail is created when its electric charge is struck by solar discharge plasma, conventionally called the "solar wind." As a comet approaches the Sun, its nucleus moves through envelopes of increased charge density. Its surface charge and internal polarization, developed in deep space, respond to the Sun's charged environment, changing its electrical potential.

As it moves away from the Sun, a comet's electrical balance with respect to the outer solar system will be different than when it was on its inward trajectory. If it meets another electrified plasma field of some kind it could begin to discharge again. What more electrically dynamic region than the one that exists around the gas giant planets?