Nov 13, 2013 New images of the third largest asteroid reveal etched chasms and deep holes. The Dawn mission continues in orbit around Vesta. Vesta is ranked high among minor planets, with Pallas (531 kilometers) and Ceres (952 kilometers) as its larger cousins. Ceres is also part of the…
Nov 12, 2013 Triton is one of the most mysterious objects in the solar system, with plumes of nitrogen spewing from frozen “geysers” near its south pole. Of Neptune’s thirteen satellites, all but one are irregular in shape and mostly rock and ice. Triton is farthest out and is much larger than…
Nov 11, 2013 Where did the extremely rarified atmosphere on Rhea come from? Relative to Saturn, Rhea is most likely negatively charged. Saturn’s powerful opposite charge is probably initiating an electric discharge, causing the water in Rhea’s icy surface to dissociate, so the presence of oxygen around the moon is…
Caveats and Complementary Notes Dendritic or “tree-like” patterns typical of lightning and electric discharge are common throughout the natural world. Many of these are poorly understood. The most fully acknowledged instance geographically is the branching ravine pattern of fluid erosion. But the subject of the Dendritic Ridge Experiment reveals the opposite characteristic:…
Nov 08, 2013 Saturn’s moon, Dione, exhibits some unusual geological formations that may indicate electrical forces at work. As the Cassini spacecraft continues to explore the environment around Saturn, more close up and detailed images reveal that its moons have experienced what might be called, “catastrophic” events in the…
Nov 07, 2013 The Electric Universe hypothesis proposes that electricity lights the stars and forms the web of galaxy clusters in the Universe. But what is it? First, “electricity” is a catchall term that describes several different phenomena: piezoelectric, thermoelectric, and even bioelectric activity are all forms of electricity….
Nov 06, 2013 The story of the ‘making of the world’ is a global legacy of all traditional cultures. One of many angles from which it can be approached is an interplay between darkness and light. From an ancient point of view, cosmic ‘creation’ was a protracted ‘dawn’, a…
Astronomers today are puzzling over the unexpected brightening of a recently discovered comet. On October 20, an observer in Japan noted that the brightness of Comet X1 LINEAR was over 100 times greater than astronomers had expected, which they explain by vaporization of ice from solar heating. But does this…
Nov 05, 2013 The proverbial ‘golden age’ is a classic case study in the difference between local and global themes in mythology. It was the German ethnologist Adolf Bastian (1826-1905) who first introduced a systematic distinction between universal ‘elementary ideas’ (Elementargedanke) and culture-specific ‘folk ideas’ (Volksgedanke) in 1860. Taken…
Nov 04, 2013 Understanding Earth’s geology is shaped by theories and ideas laid down over 300 years ago. Only four forces were known all those years ago: water, wind, volcanic and tectonic processes. It continues to be a fundamental premise in geology that it requires millions of years for…
