According to a recent
press release
the European Space Agency's
Herschel space observatory
has detected a torus of water vapor
around Saturn. The newly discovered
ring is extremely diffuse and
invisible to optical telescopes,
requiring Herschel's infrared
sensors to see it.
The total width of the water
vapor ring is about 603,000
kilometers, but its thickness is
scarcely one-tenth of that. It
appears that the comet-like jets
emanating from the south pole of
Saturn's tiny moon Enceladus are
constantly replenishing the water
supply while it orbits the giant
planet. As the ESA report states,
Enceladus "...is showering rain
water onto its home planet."
This is not the first time a
hitherto unseen ring around Saturn
required infrared vision to find.
The
Spitzer Space Telescope
discovered a new ring in a
retrograde orbit, tilted off the
main ring plane by 27 degrees. It is
much larger than the ring found by
Herschel: 2 million kilometers wide
and 2.5 million kilometers from top
to bottom.
The Cassini spacecraft's
observations of Enceladus
reveal charged vapor plumes erupting
from the south pole that follow
magnetic fields. Enceladus orbits
inside Saturn's magnetosphere, so
the moon acts like a generator:
conducting plasma moving through
Saturn's magnetic field induces
current flow. This fact was
confirmed when Cassini observed the
electromagnetic "footprint" of
Enceladus in Saturn's polar aurora.
Of greater interest was a note of
the time-variable correspondence
between emissions from the moon's
polar discharge points and the
auroral footprint's brightness.
The “tiger stripes” on Enceladus
are constantly referred to as "steam
vents," both in scholarly journals
and in science blogs. They are said
to "channel water to the surface" in
the same way a terrestrial geyser
might: heating water in a
constricted tube until it overcomes
the resistance to steam pressure.
It is widely presumed by
astrophysicists that the Universe is
electrically neutral, so when
electrically active plasma is found
in space, or on other rocky bodies,
it is glossed over. Localized
phenomena no matter how improbable
are invoked: tidal "kneading," "cryo-vulcanism,"
and "geysers" erupting from
underground chambers of liquid water
are given as the cause for activity
seen on Enceladus, while electricity
is ignored.
The vents on Enceladus are scars
caused by traveling electric arcs.
They are similar to the "sinuous
rilles" seen on Jupiter's moon
Europa. They are often found in
parallel, cutting across other
channels as if they were not there.
Such characteristics contradict the
idea that they are fractures or
"strike-slip faults."
For Enceladus to gain the
features that we observe today, it
must have been gouged and torn,
rather than cracked and broken. A
white-hot torch seems to have carved
the surface, disregarding the prior
topography: a sure sign that an
electric arc was the active agent.
The tiger stripes show parallelism
not because they are open cracks but
because filamentary electric
currents flowing across a surface
tend to align and follow the ambient
magnetic field direction.
As Electric Universe theory
proposes, the rilles on Enceladus,
as well as the anomalous heat flow
from its poles, are due to
electromagnetic induction. The water
vapor traveling the circuits back
and forth from Saturn is
electrically “machined” from
Enceladus.
Stephen Smith
Hat tip to Thane Hubbell
New
DVD
The Lightning-Scarred
Planet Mars
A video documentary that could
change everything you thought you
knew about ancient times and
symbols. In this second episode of
Symbols of an Alien Sky, David
Talbott takes the viewer on an
odyssey across the surface of Mars.
Exploring feature after feature of
the planet, he finds that only
electric arcs could produce the
observed patterns. The high
resolution images reveal massive
channels and gouges, great mounds,
and crater chains, none finding an
explanation in traditional geology,
but all matching the scars from
electric discharge experiments in
the laboratory. (Approximately 85
minutes)
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