Nothing to Melt

A giant coma, larger than the Sun, surrounded Comet Holmes. Credit: Jean-Charles Cuillandre (CFHT) & Giovanni Anselmi (Coelum Astronomia), Hawaiian Starlight.

 

Mar 16, 2018

Comets are not made of ice and mud.

Accepted astrophysical theories would never lead astronomers to consider X-rays from comets. Comets are supposed to be dirty snowballs, gradually melting away as they approach the Sun. However, as previously written, both the Giotto and Deep Impact missions revealed that comets are scorched, cratered, and fractured. No ice, reflective crust, or watery clouds were seen. Giotto’s close approach to Halley’s comet was a complete surprise: the comet’s plumes blasted out from a dense nucleus; the blackest object ever observed.

The Deep Impact mission to Comet Tempel 1 found craters, boulders, and cliffs—nothing like a snowball. Small amounts of water vapor was discovered, but there was not enough ice on the surface to account for it. When the famous comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 exploded in Jupiter’s magnetosphere, the fragments did not expel any volatile compounds. Comet Borrelly was found to be hot and dry. Comet Wild 2 was extremely dusty, but there was no water on its surface. One of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko’s most striking features is that it looks like a piece of slag from a blast furnace. Again, that idea does not conform to the prevailing opinions about comets.

Rather than “dirty snowballs” or even “snowy dirtballs,” comets are electrically active, solid bodies. They form plasma sheaths called, “comas”, often more than a million kilometers in diameter. In fact, Comet Elenin’s coma was over twice the size of Jupiter, fooling some alarmists into thinking it was a solid object instead of wispy gas 1000 times less dense than a puff of smoke.

Comets travel through variable electric potentials as they get closer to the Sun. Those electric fields cause surface glow discharges, resulting from plasma filament “hot spots”. So hot that extreme ultraviolet light and X-rays were detected radiating from comet Hyakutake. In 1976, astronomer Robert Roosen photographed what he thought were plasmoids colliding in the tail of comet Kohoutek. A paper authored by J. C. Brandt and himself (Possible Detection of Colliding Plasmoids in the Tail of Comet Kohoutek (1973f)), took issue with Fred Whipple’s dirty snowball theory.

Electric Universe advocate, Wal Thornhill wrote:

“The electric field near the comet nucleus is expected if a comet is a highly negatively charged body, relative to the solar wind…So the presence of negative oxygen and other ions close to the comet nucleus is to be expected. Negative oxygen ions will be accelerated away from the comet in the cathode jets and combine with protons from the solar wind to form the observed OH radical at some distance from the nucleus. The important point is that the OH does not need to come from water ice on, or in, the comet.”

Stephen Smith

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