Original Post August 27, 2012 Mercury reveals the violence of planetary genesis. Mercury’s story is probably a complicated tale of extremes. The planet’s surface is heavily scarred, with steep-walled canyons, scarps that rise up several kilometers, and craters that penetrate the crust for several kilometers below the mean elevation. The…
Original Post August 22, 2012 Astronomers continue to ignore electricity in space, opting for outdated ideas about gravity and heat. Astronomers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics announced that our own Milky Way galaxy is expelling enormous jets of gamma rays from a putative supermassive black hole residing in its…
Original Post August 20, 2012 It twists like a Birkeland Current; it’s stringy like a Birkeland Current; it’s dense like a Birkeland Current; but Everyone Knows (if they want to pursue a career in astronomy) that There is No Such Thing as Electricity in Space. The press release for…
Original Post August 16, 2012 Recent X-class solar flares have ignited the polar lights. An electrically active magnetotail (or plasma tail) extends for millions of kilometers from Earth. Charged particles from the Sun, otherwise known as the solar wind, together with ions generated by the Earth, gather in a…
Original Post August 10, 2012 What causes the rapid changes observed in Orion Nebula “protostars”? Using a combination of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the ESA Herschel Space Observatory, astronomers found that so-called “young stars” are changing in brightness much faster than they thought possible. Instead of taking several years…
Original Post August 8, 2012 The significance of life on other planets leaves many unanswered questions. Note: In May 1976 Richard H. Smith, the father of Stephen Smith, TPOD managing editor, speculated about the possibility and significance of extraterrestrial life. The universal feeling that man is unique has been challenged…
Original Post August 3, 2012 A new theory states that dark matter might prevent stars from aging normally and preserve them for billions of years. According to astronomers, the Universe is almost 14 billion years old. It started out with a bang – an explosion occurred and all of existence…
Original Post August 2, 2012 Did tectonic and volcanic forces create the wide, parallel trenches on the Moon? The Moon has seen cataclysmic devastation at some time in its past. There are giant craters, wide and deep valleys, and multi-kilometer long rilles crisscrossing its surface. Conventional theories postulate that the…
Original Post July 29, 2012 Images from Cassini seem to indicate deltas and river channels. Could electricity have formed these features on Titan? Recent data from the Cassini-Solstice mission is said to reveal oceans of liquid ethane, in one case occupying an area as large as 26,000 square kilometers, in…
Original Post July 6, 2012 What happened to the ring of dust circling TYC 8241 2652 in the constellation Centaurus? A recent press release expresses surprise and confusion about the absence of a stellar dust ring that seems to have vanished without a trace. What is most surprising to…
