“Landslides” on Pluto’s moon, Charon. Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Oct 21, 2016
Pluto’s frigid companion exhibits electrical scarring.
All information from New Horizons is now available, its onboard memory is completely downloaded. The spacecraft is currently on its way to the Kuiper Belt and a rendezvous with 2014 MU69, another small body more than a billion kilometers beyond Pluto. Images from many spacecraft sent to explore the Solar System reveal landscapes that are strikingly similar. Most exhibit structures that are expected in an Electric Universe, and those sent from New Horizons are no exception.
Previous Picture of the day articles describe effects that catastrophic discharges from some source of electricity can (and did) create. Every rocky body in the Solar System is the scene of destructive processes: deep canyons and trenches with vertical sidewalls; craters with flat bottoms and scalloped edges; fulgurites embedded in the sides of both craters and rilles; brachiated channels with regularly spaced “railroad tie” ripples; sloping ridges that end in vertical cliffs and half-melted, “slumping” formations at every scale.
Data from New Horizons prompted the mission team to describe Pluto’s moon, Charon as experiencing, “…a surprisingly violent past of titanic upheavals…” Indeed, one of the most impressive features on Charon is its own “grand canyon”, four times longer than the Grand Canyon in Arizona and up to twice as deep. Again, as a recent press release states: “These faults and canyons indicate a titanic geological upheaval in Charon’s past”.
According to Ross Beyer from the New Horizons Geology, Geophysics and Imaging team at the SETI Institute and NASA Ames Research Center: “We thought the probability of seeing such interesting features on this satellite of a world at the far edge of our solar system was low.”
Pluto is so remote and so cold it was thought that nothing much happened to it and its family since they formed billions of years ago. Pluton and Charon are both dwarf planets, part of a frigid grouping of many worlds at the limit of detection from space-based telescopes. All are thought to be ancient, with little to alter them since they condensed from a primordial “nebular cloud”. Electric Universe theory, however, does not ascribe to the Nebular Hypothesis, preferring a more active evolution in space. Instead of slow, gradual changes with no chaos, electrical activity was once more intense and far-reaching than in today’s world.
As noted, quotes from mission team members express their surprise and puzzlement about Charon. How did its red north polar region develop? What caused the tortured topography? Those questions can never be adequately answered until electricity as an active agent in the cosmos is considered.
Charged objects immersed in electric fields develop Langmuir sheaths, named for early plasma physicist Irving Langmuir. Langmuir sheaths form double layers that isolate charged objects from each other. Charged celestial bodies, such as planets or moons, are surrounded by double layer plasmaspheres, for the most part. Charon has no plasmasphere, so it is not electrically active at this time in its history. However, that does not mean that it was not enveloped in a charge sheath at some previous time.
Laboratory experiments show that when charge sheaths collide they cause electrical breakdown, and if there is sufficient charge flow an electric arc will erupt. Small charge sheaths in the laboratory behave in a certain fashion, forming electric discharges, so larger planetary sheaths could trigger gigantic lightning bolts. Such interplanetary discharges could rip rock strata apart, carve surfaces with a plasma “torch” effect, and create intense heat through electromagnetic induction.
Rather than stretching or collapse, the rilles and craters on Charon could have been cut by electric discharges in the recent past.
Stephen Smith
