A post on Quora that immediately made me think of the EU

[jrbleau]

I'm new here. I did a cursory check to see if this topic has been covered at Thunderbolts but it appears not.

At Quora.com, someone asked "Has the international space station made any big breakthrough discoveries?" The following answer, by a "Darian Binner", caught my eye:

We did manage to figure out how planets were made on the ISS.. by coincidence. In 2003 Donald R. Pettit was getting ready to demonstrate fun things you can do in microgravity. One of the experiments involved putting Salt and Sugar in bags filled with water and observing the results.

Instead of nothing happening (which was expected)… this happened:

The salt started to form large clumps.

When the images were beamed back to Earth, a theoretical physicist and former astronaut Stanley G. Love was there. He was trained in planetary science, and when he saw the results of the experiment, he contacted Donald and said “Don! Do you realize you've just solved the middle stage of planetary accretion?”

In a violent environment with 100m/s wind (such as the solar acretion disk) such clumps would be incredibly difficult to form. Donald found out that when he put his finger close to the bag the salt would be drawn to it. Stanley thinks that the clumps are drawn together due to electrostatic forces. While the experiment didn’t have ideal conditions, it was repeated on the Fallturm Bremen with successful results.

What mainly caught my eye is in bold. Has this been covered by Thunderbolts?

Link: https://www.quora.com/Has-the-internati ... iscoveries

[Metryq]

It reminds me of another Pettit video featuring knitting needles.