The Exploding Comets

In my post Signs in the Sky, I began by pointing out that we are now living through the convulsions of a dying age, and that the transition from the present world age to the new one that is coming will be accompanied by world-wide calamities brought about by a close encounter with a comet.

I ended the post by remarking that scientists today display little concern about the potential threat posed by comets, because they have been lulled into a state of complacency by a model of the universe that has not only become outdated, but has now been invalidated by the latest information relayed by space probes.

For the last sixty years, orthodox astronomers and astrophysicists have clung to an obsolete theory proposed by the American astronomer Fred Whipple in 1950.

Whipple maintained that comets weren’t rocky objects like asteroids or meteors, but instead consisted mainly of ice together with some dust and frozen gases such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia.

Whipple’s hypothesis, which came to be known as the “dirty snowball” model, soon gained widespread acceptance among the scientific community, and it remains to this day the model that is taught in all the leading colleges and universities of the world.

What distinguishes comets from other space objects like asteroids, is that as they draw closer to the Sun, they begin to glow and develop various luminous tails, which point away from the sun and stretch for many millions of miles.

According to the “dirty snowball” model, when a comet approaches the Sun, a “Coma” or glowing envelope forms around the nucleus or head of the comet, as the solid matter of the core is converted directly into a gas through a process known as “sublimation”.

As conventional theory explains, these pockets of ionized gas inside the nucleus of the comet, formed by the radiant heat of the sun and the Solar Wind, then explode to form the jets of material commonly seen emerging from the heads of comets.

Then as the comet approaches its perihelion, or closest approach to the Sun, the ice that makes up the bulk of the nucleus of the comet steadily boils away, causing it to shrink in size with every successive orbit until nothing remains.

However, when scientists began sending probes into space with sophisticated instruments that enabled them to examine the nature of comets more closely, they were startled to find that their results were very different from what the “dirty snowball” model predicted.

For example, when NASA launched its Deep Impact probe in 2005 to study the surface of Comet Tempel 1, images sent back by the probe portrayed an object that looked surprisingly like an asteroid, as can be seen from the photograph on the right.

The absence of any surface ice, together with evidence of numerous impact craters on the comet’s surface, seems remarkably similar to the asteroid 21 Lutetia, photographed in 2011 by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta probe, as shown below.

Space probes have now been sent to five different comets. They are the comets Halley, Borrelly, Wild 2, Tempel 1 and Hartley 2. Yet none of these comets have shown any evidence of surface ice, as the “dirty snowball” theory requires.

In order to gain a better understanding of the constituents of comets, NASA launched its Stardust Mission to Comet Wild 2 in 1999, in order to evaluate its dust and formative material, and to return samples of these to the earth.

Whereas scientists had expected to find evidence of surface ice, when these samples were later recovered and examined in the laboratory, they revealed a complete absence of water. And when NASA extended its Deep Space mission (DS1) to include an encounter with Comet Borrelly in 2001, it was also found to be hot and dry, with not a hint of water.

But the absence of surface ice was just one of many challenges to the long-established “dirty snowball” theory. There were also problems caused by comets whose Comas continued to flare, even when they were vast distances away from the heat of the Sun.

In 1991, five years after it had made its closest approach to the Sun, the much-heralded Comet Halley was travelling beyond the planet Uranus some 1.3 billion miles from the Sun, in temperatures of around minus 330 degrees Fahrenheit.

Its nucleus had been reduced to a faint speck in the darkness of space, visible only through telescopes, and its tail had long since disappeared. Then without warning, something happened to Comet Halley that totally defied conventional theory.

As Associated Press reported at the time, it unexpectedly erupted with an immense dust cloud about 180,000 miles across, causing it to become a thousand times brighter than it had been a few days before.

Then in 1997, when Comet Hale-Bopp was also farther out in space than the orbit of Uranus, it continued to flare just as it had done earlier when it dominated the skies of earth. It still displayed a Coma, a dust tail, and an ion tail more than a million kilometres long.

As if the above examples were not enough to severely dent the “dirty snowball” theory, then the behaviour of Comet Holmes should have been sufficient to demolish it entirely.

In October 2007, Holmes suddenly and unexpectedly brightened by a factor of a million. In less than 24 hours it grew to a magnitude so large that it was easily visible to the naked eye, as can be seen from this photograph.

Its Coma continued to grow in size until by mid-November it had become the largest object in the solar system, even larger than the Sun. The Coma had grown from 28 thousand kilometres in diameter to seven million kilometres.

The challenge this posed to conventional theory was that, at the time of its extraordinary display, Comet Holmes was moving away from the Sun in the extreme cold of deep space. Furthermore, its brilliant illumination continued to shine for months afterward.

One might have thought that this remarkable display by Comet Holmes, which flew in the face of all accepted theory, would have caused a sensation in the world of astronomy. But as Scott Wall wrote in his 2008 article entitled “Comet Holmes – a Media Non-event”:

“You might think that this remarkable behaviour would be big news, particularly among astronomers. A prominent Astronomy magazine recently published their top ten news stories of 2007. Surprisingly, this spectacular comet was not named as the top story. It didn’t even finish in the top ten. In fact, the entire magazine completely ignored the comet. There was not even an editorial comment. Additionally, there was little if any newspaper or TV coverage….” (View Source)

The silence among the astronomical community was deafening, and for good reason, for the behaviour of Comet Holmes defied all conventional understanding.

The anomalies quoted above have continued to multiply, with yet more examples of the unusual behaviour of comets, particularly their uncanny ability to explode violently in defiance of conventional theory.

In December 2010, a long-period comet was discovered by a Russian amateur astronomer Leonid Elenin, and in accordance with common astronomical practice, this comet was named after him.

Comet Elenin soon became an Internet sensation when doomsayers predicted that it would bring disaster to the earth, by fulfilling the looming threat of the prophecies associated with the end of the Mayan calendar in December 2012.

These “gloomsayers” claimed that the comet would trigger catastrophic earthquakes around the world, as a result of its gravitational interaction with the earth. Ironically, it turned out that it was the comet itself that was destroyed, rather than the earth.

On August 19, 2011, when Elenin was roughly 45 million miles away from the Sun (about half the distance between the earth and the Sun), the comet suddenly exploded into a cloud of debris, leaving astronomers everywhere confounded.

Now Elenin was not the first comet to have exploded unexpectedly while in orbit around the Sun, nor has it been the last. Some have even exploded much farther away from the Sun than Elenin was at the time of its demise.

When comet West was first discovered by the Danish astronomer Richard West in August 1975, it immediately showed promise of becoming one of the most spectacular comets ever seen in our skies.

This early promise was vindicated when, following its perihelion on February 26, 1976, it could even be seen in bright daylight. Yet despite the fact that it was speeding away from the Sun, it suddenly exploded and disintegrated into fragments.

Another long-period comet discovered in 1999 was comet Linear. Although it wasn’t due to orbit around the Sun until July, 2000, it began to break up while it was still about 70 million miles away, and disintegrated completely some two weeks later.

Finally there was the case of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. As reported in my post Signs in the Sky this comet was observed to break apart and split into a series of fragments that rained down upon the planet Jupiter.

Astronomers trained to interpret all comet behaviour within the confines of the “dirty snowball” model, have been at a complete loss to explain the anomalies outlined above.

In fact many of them have confessed, like Donald Brownlee, principle investigator of NASA’s Stardust Mission: “It’s a mystery to me how comets work at all“.

Their confusion is hardly to be wondered at, since they have been trying for years to explain the phenomena of comets in the context of a Cosmological theory that is palpably wrong.

As has been described in previous instalments, a new breed of scientists have come forward to explain the mysteries of comets within a revolutionary new theory of the universe, which they call the “Electric Universe”.

What they have done has been to build on the Cosmology of the past by including an ingredient which had been overlooked by such scientific giants as Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein. That ingredient is electromagnetism.

And it is only when the electromagnetic force is restored to its rightful place as a fundamental building block of the universe, that the mysteries of comets can not only be explained, but predicted in advance.

The theory of the “Electric Universe” is predicated on the thesis that the entire universe is basically electrical in nature. So in terms of this theory, we are electric beings living on an electric earth, which orbits around an electric Sun as it travels through electric space.

And comets are actually electrically charged objects travelling through an electrically charged field of space. As plasma physicist Wallace Thornhill, one of the leading proponents of this electrical theory, puts it:

“Comets spend most of their time far from the Sun where the charge density is low. Since comets move slowly, their electric charges reach equilibrium with the weak, radial solar electric field. When a comet falls in to the inner Solar System closer to the Sun, however, its nucleus accelerates into regions of increasing charge density and voltage.

“Charge polarization in the nucleus respond to the increasing electrical stress, forming a vast coma (plasma sheath) around the comet. Discharge jets flare up and move across the surface, similar to the plumes on Jupiter’s moon, Io. If the internal electrical stress becomes too great, the nucleus may explode like an overcharged capacitor, breaking into fragments or vanishing forever. Similar effects are most likely responsible for meteoric explosions in Earth’s atmosphere, such as the one that occurred over Tunguska in Siberia.”  (View Source)

And in answer to the extraordinary display produced by comet Holmes described earlier, Thornhill had this to say:

“Outbursts from comets at great distances from the Sun seem to be correlated with a sudden change in the solar ‘wind’ plasma environment due to a solar storm. The point about sudden comet outbursts is that we are dealing with a sudden, discontinuous process of plasma discharge – a switch from dark current mode to normal glow mode. It is a complex surface phenomenon that cannot be predicted. The best we can do is to say that the passage of a sudden change in the solar wind is the most likely time to see a flareup“. (View Source)

In the case of comet Holmes, it is worth noting that there was a large spike in the density of the Solar Wind just two days before the flare-up occurred. This could well have been the electrical stimulus needed to switch the plasma sheath surrounding the nucleus of the comet into “normal glow mode”, as explained in the previous instalment.

Sceptical scientists wedded to the “dirty-snowball” theory of comets may well shrug their shoulders at this new emphasis on the electromagnetic nature of comets, and insist that there still is no reason for people to become alarmed when comets appear in the skies above the earth.

After all they might argue, comets that explode in space, for whatever reason, cease to be a threat to earth simply because they destroy themselves in the process. However, these scientists would do well to examine more closely recent events that could have a profound effect on the future of the world.

Suppose for example, a large comet was to enter our Solar System and instead of orbiting around the Sun, ended up crashing into it. Would this be a threat to the earth? It so happens that we now have scientific evidence to answer this question.

The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) that was launched in 1995 to study the Sun, recently captured the final moments of a comet that collided with the Sun. What was significant was that the Sun released an enormous CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) at the very moment that the body of the comet collided with the Sun.

And if a powerful Solar Flare was released in the direction of the earth, this sudden blast of radiation could well become the famous “Kill Shot” that so many doomsayers have been predicting in recent years.

Astronomers ought also be aware of meteoric explosions that can cause extensive surface damage on the earth, such as the one that occurred near the Tunguska river in Siberia in 1908.

It is also worth recalling the incident that happened earlier this year, when a meteor about 18 yards wide travelling at 40,000 miles an hour exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk in central Russia, with a force 25 times greater than the nuclear bomb that exploded over Hiroshima in Japan, as shown below.

What is significant about this incident is that the same electromagnetic forces that cause comets to explode, cause asteroids and meteors to explode as well. In this particular case the explosion was the result of internal electrical stresses building up inside the meteor, as a result of the charge differential between itself and the earth.

This NASA video ends with the chilling warning. “There are millions more just like it. And that is something to think about.”

How long will it be before we witness the next one?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2020 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Signs in the Sky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comments and pings are closed.