Ariel's Cicatricial Visage
Jan 28, 2009

What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm of time?
The Tempest, Act 1 Scene 2
--- William Shakespeare

August 20, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 2 spacecraft on a twelve-year mission to explore the outer planets. Voyager 2 crossed the termination shock marking the edge of the Solar System on July 10, 2008, and will soon be considered an interstellar spacecraft once it penetrates the Sun's heliosheath.

During its closest approach to Uranus in January 1986, Voyager 2 recorded several images of the giant planet's family of moons and found them to be scenes of cataclysmic devastation, with giant craters, wide and deep valleys, and long, sinuous cracks, or rilles extending for hundreds of kilometers. Among those ravaged bodies is Ariel, whose surface features resemble those found on many moons in the Saturnian system.

Ariel is pockmarked with craters ranging from five to ten kilometers across—almost undetectable in the image above—however, a few craters measuring 20-30 kilometers across are visible. The crater dimensions might seem small, but considering Ariel's equatorial diameter of 1160 kilometers they are comparatively large.

Conventional understanding proposes that Ariel has been the scene of intense geologic activity in the past several million (if not billion) years. The rilles and offset slip faults are said to have been caused by slow crustal movements similar to those which are theorized to cause earthquakes. This process requires that Ariel was born long ago, along with its parent and siblings, from a primordial nebular cloud.

The parochial nature of scientific theories demands that the forces experienced on Earth are to be used as models for the formations observed elsewhere and that eons of time are necessary for them to mature. However, since there is no evidence whatsoever that a moon like Ariel was once subjected to tectonic activity—other than the aforementioned conservative scientific tendency—the Electric Universe theory states that the idea should be turned on its head: structures we see in space should be used as models for what is found on Earth.

Since similar patterns are observed wherever our instruments are focused, a reasonable hypothesis would demonstrate how airless, frozen bodies hovering near temperatures close to absolute zero can compare to hot, wet planets. Of all the cosmic forces under consideration in consensus scientific reports about the universe, electricity is given little credence, although it is 39 orders of magnitude more powerful in its effects than gravity. Heating a solid, or cracking it, is as nothing when compared to energizing it with a multi-trillion joule proton beam.

How does the electric force manifest itself?

One remarkable example is the bright-edged crater to the left of the central scar: it is hexagonal, much like craters on nearly every celestial body in the Solar System, Earth included. How can the detonation of a colliding rock cause a hexagonal crater? No experiment has been able to demonstrate a polygonal shape left behind after an explosive event.

Explosions (such as that from a meteor impact) do not aggregate constituent particles into stable configurations; they induce chaotic behavior that leaves little in the way of identifiable forms. As has been pointed-out in several previous Picture of the Day articles, hexagons are created when intense particle beams touch down on a solid surface.

Researchers studying the issue have found that beams of electricity flowing through plasma create a central column surrounded by concentric cylinders. The cylindrical current filaments exhibit long-range attraction and short-range repulsion braiding that result in evenly spaced vortices surrounding the column. As the filaments rotate around one another, a preferred hexagonal cross-section forms within the innermost column.

The steep-walled scarps crossing Ariel are reminiscent of those on Saturn's moons Enceladus, Tethys, and Dione, or Jupiter's moon Europa, or Hadley Rille on the Moon. It could also be said that the great Rift Valley on Earth shares some characteristics with the long chasms that span other worlds.

Enceladus, Mars, Mercury, Ganymede: these and many others compare to the morphology of Ariel. Size is not important; mineralogical composition is not important; temperature or distance from the Sun are not important; what is important are the electric currents flowing through space and their interactions with clouds of plasma. Lightning bolts of immense size and power can be generated that are capable of incinerating any matter, or tearing it to pieces in electrodynamic vices. The resulting scars and craters are the remnants of those cutting and piercing forces.

By Stephen Smith