A Closer Look at the Scientific Examination of Comets

Most people do not realize that the comet tail sweeps around the Sun like the spoke of a wheel and actually precedes the nucleus when the comet is receding away from the Sun...

(SAN DIEGO) -

A sequence of Comet Lovejoy approaching
the Sun -Wikipedia

In a report from London dated Dec. 19, 2011 titled, “Comet Lovejoy Just Misses the Sun”, the scientists reported: “Newly discovered comet, Lovejoy, defied all odds when it survived a hellish journey through the Sun’s corona, where temperatures soar to staggering 1.1 million C. Astronomers had completely expected the comet to meet its fiery death but they were left astonished when the 660-foot-wide icy rock disappeared around the back side of the Sun, coming within 87,000 miles of its surface and emerging triumphantly out the other side.”

My involvement with Mr. Patrick Glynn Program Director of Copley Radio News Service began in 1985 when comet Halley was in the news. I wrote to him and many others my concept that a comet was not a dirty snowball but a solid mass that generated a charge of static electricity while traveling through the magnetic field of the Sun at its speed of 120, 000 miles per hour. And it is this static electricity charge that stimulated the normally invisible gases around the nucleus to a glowing, visible state of excitement. And the energy radiated from the Sun increased in intensity via the natural electrical induction process so that its increased energy stimulated the gases in its path past the nucleus to a glowing state of excitement to create the glowing tail.

In a 'Wireless Flash News' issued to the subscribers of the Copley Radio News, moderators of many radio stations for topics to discuss, the Flash News “New Tale of Halley’s Tail” dated April 4, 1985 stated:

“

Are scientists flakes for explaining that the brilliant tail of Halley’s comet is a snowball of dust and frozen gas. The reasoning goes that as the Sun heats the snowball it sheds molecules and dust that are pushed into two separate tails by sunlight and the solar wind. But retired San Diego inventor and amateur astronomer Edsel Chromie says that’s a bunch of malarkey, First of all, he says sunlight striking a mass of dust and frozen gas wouldn’t light up the sky the way Halley’s Comet does. Instead, Chromie’s theory is based on the concept of static electricity. He says Halley’s Comet has a weak static electricity charge. When the comet breaks the magnetic lines of the Sun’s force at high speed, it stimulates the molecules of gases already in the path of the comet to a visible glow. Chromie says it’s not much different than natural forces that cause lightning or the phenomenon known as aurora borealis or ‘Northern Lights.'

”

This resulted in a live telephone radio discussion with the moderators of many radio stations.

Most people do not realize that the comet tail sweeps around the Sun like the spoke of a wheel and actually precedes the nucleus when the comet is receding away from the Sun... This means that the particles at the end of the 100 million mile long tail would have to gain more than 3 times its 120,000 mile per hour speed when it leaves the nucleus in order to travel 100 million miles ahead of the nucleus while traveling in a 100 million greater radius than the nucleus... Very clearly, this is a mathematical and physical impossibility. When I pointed this out, some scientists claim that it is not the same particles in the tail that sweep around the Sun but are continually replenished particles. Thus poses another problem. According to the book of engineering constants, when water is boiled, it expands to 1,100 times its volume. Even if the entire 3 mile by 3 mile by 7 mile nucleus sublimated (vaporized) in one instant, its expansion would have to be 1 trillion, 636 billion times the total mass of the nucleus to fill the 50 thousand mile diameter of the coma alone... This would be equivalent to stretching one single drop of water around the circumference of the Earth 268 times. Plus, the t100 million mile long tails is 2,000 times greater in volume than the coma and would have to be entirely replenished at least 13 times while the comet was within the inner solar system.

In a Nov. 30, 1996 ITV broadcast titled, “Meteorites, Asteroids and Comets”, Dr. Donald K. Yeomans, Senior Scientist at JPL, said: “Two surprises when the Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted on Jupiter in 1994 were that sulfur was detected and water wasn’t. The problem is, if this thing is a comet and is mostly water ice, why didn’t we see water from the comet itself, even if it didn’t get down to the water layer of Jupiter?” Then another scientist continued: “The scientists speculate that the comet lost all of its water through eons of traveling through space.” Remember, scientists have previously been speculating that all of the water on Earth has been brought to the Earth by the comets collecting water through its eons of traveling through space. Now they contradict this by speculating that it lost its water by the same process.

In another instance, on June 26, 1985, the astronomers at Kitt Peak reported witnessing “the birth of a dusty snowball” when Halley’s Comet was approaching the Sun and was still 600 million miles from the Sun. When it reached a point 50,000 miles from the Sun, the “heat” of the Sun created a coma only 50,000 miles in diameter.

Six tears after it was first detected and when the comet had receded 1, 3 billion miles from the Sun, on March 6, 1991, the scientists reported Halley’s Comet “erupted into a shiny dust cloud 180,000 miles across.” This is where the ambient temperature is 346 degrees F. below zero and the comet had been in a below zero ambient temperature for well over a year. If the “heat of the Sun” created a coma only 50,000 miles in diameter when the comet was only 50,000 miles from the Sun, how can the “heat” of the Sun create the 189,000 mile diameter coma 1.3 billion miles from the Sun? In response to a question I asked the JPL scientists and other scientists in 1986 “Why didn’t the entire nucleus of Halley’s Comet melt when the comet was so close to the Sun for many months?” Dr. Stephen J. Edberg, a scientist at JPL wrote in a letter dated April 26, 1986: “An insulating layer of dust allows a comet to be warmer than the melting point of ice. Your refrigerator uses insulation to keep food cold.”

In a letter dated March 6, 1993, Dr. Brian Marsden, of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, wrote: “While the anomalous brightening of Halley’s Comet at such distance is intriguing, I can certainly imagine some shifting of what is still basically a loose structure in such a way that a small pocket of highly volatile ice is suddenly exposed to sunlight.” Dr. Henry Brinton, Director of the Research Program Management Division of NASA, wrote “The structure of the nucleus is extremely porous. Thus heat penetrates slowly into the nucleus, even as it recedes from the Sun. When some heat reaches a pocket of more volatile ices, such as carbon monoxide, that ice sublimates (vaporizes) rapidly, flows through the pores and entrains dust it, making a large cloud of dust as reported when Comet Halley had receded far from the Sun in 1991.”

In a letter dated Feb. 24, 1991, just two weeks before the astronomers in Hawaii reported that the comet “sprouted a shiny dust cloud”, John H. Simonetti, professor of physics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute, wrote: “Periodically returning comets become less spectacular with successive passages, which is consistent with their loss of material on each passage. Consult a local comet expert for a calculation shoeing how bright typical comets will be.” Then, just two weeks after professor Simonetti wrote the letter and the comet supposedly would have lost much of its material on the very same orbit while it was close to the Sun and sublimating dust and ice from 1985 through 1991, the comet became more brilliant and created a coma 3 times larger than when it was closer to the Sun.

In 1985 when the International Cometary Explorer flew right through the tail of the Giacobini-Zinner comet tail, Flight Director, Robert Farquhar said: “With the ship well into the tail, we haven’t seen any dust at all. I’m very surprised.” And a scientist on the imaging team at Darmstadt, Germany, reviewing the data from Halley’s Comet said: “VEGA 1 showed that Halley’s coma was cleaner than the clean rooms manufacturers use to assemble spacecraft.” No water and no dust have been detected around any comet.

However, on April 5, 1996, NASA reported that they were surprised because comet Hyakutake was emitting X-ray energy at a rate 100 times higher than it should. And on April 27, 1996, it was reported: “Researchers are in a quandary. They are trying to figure out whether X-rays are coming from comet Hyakutake or if the solar wind is blowing X-rays from the Sun into the comet’s atmosphere.” Clearly, the X-rays are not coming from either one but are the result of the comet traveling at high velocity through the magnetic field of the Sun.

These comments reveal the extents the scientists will go to adhere to their beliefs in spite of the evidence I have been pointing out to them indicating that they are wrong. In a letter from Dr. Brian Marsden dated Jan. 10, 1996 he wrote: “I sensed I would not convince you of the general correctness of Whipple’s icy-conglomerate model. Why are there molecular (radical) emissions in cometary spectra? These indicate that some kind of physical process, such as the vaporization of ices, is actively going on, and one is seeing the effect of photo dissociation of more complex molecules. The dominant elements in those molecules are hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen and oxygen. Water has always been a good bet for the principal substance. Whipple argued this when the direct evidence for water was only the presence of hydroxyl emissions at the extreme blue end of the spectrum.” I hope this latest evidence from Comet Lovejoy will prod the scientists to wise up. But I won’t hold my breadth. They will undoubtedly concoct some bizarre scenario to perpetuate their belief. I think it is a shame that the scientists have wasted so many billions of dollars of taxpayers money on their wild goose chase and folly when it should have been more obvious to them as it was to me that a comet nucleus is not a flaky snowball.

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Edsel Chromie is a Detroit Michigan native who moved to San Diego in 1965. Edsel is a World War Two Navy veteran who served as a motor machinists mate on diesel electric systems where he learned about the magnetic field current swirling around the primary current flow through a wire as a part of Navy training to trace the direction of flow of the electricity in case of torpedo damage.

This led to Edsel's unique explanations of many phenomena of the universe. He also has four approved patents on solar energy and Sun tracking systems. Today Edsel writes about this unique set of life experiences for Salem-News.com, conveying information that seems especially relevant as nuclear disaster, potential changes in the earth's atmosphere, and what many view as an increasing level of natural disasters continue to dominate headlines. Perhaps many of the answers are on hand, yet unaccepted by the scientific community. You can write to Ed Chromie at this address: edchromie@cox.net