Electric Comets — Tempel 1, Wild 2, and 67P

If you want to judge the Electric Universe by its sharpest claim of predictive success, comets are the place to look. Here the theory made specific, dated, published predictions ahead of major space missions — and its proponents argue the missions delivered. This page tells that story in the proponents' terms, with the paper trail linked.

Two pictures of a comet

The standard picture descends from Fred Whipple's "dirty snowball": a comet is a primordial body of ices and dust; approaching the Sun, its ices sublimate, producing the coma and tails. Refinements since the spacecraft era (an "icy dirtball" with more rock than ice, sub-surface volatiles under an insulating crust) keep sublimation as the engine.

The electric picture, developed chiefly by Wal Thornhill following Ralph Juergens, starts from the comet's orbit: a body spending most of its time far from the Sun acquires a strongly negative charge relative to the plasma environment near the Sun. Diving sunward across the Sun's electric field, it discharges: the coma is a glow-discharge sheath, the jets are cathode arcs machining the surface, the fine "dust" is electrically eroded rock, and the tail is part of the circuit. The model therefore expects comet nuclei to look like dry, rocky, sharply sculpted bodies — burnt, cratered, and carved — rather than melting snowbanks.

Deep Impact, July 4, 2005: the predictions on the record

NASA's Deep Impact mission fired a 370 kg copper projectile into comet Tempel 1. The day before impact, the Thunderbolts group published a list of expectations from the electric model — the page is still up, datestamped — including:

• a flash before physical contact (an arc as the charged projectile closes with the charged nucleus),

• an impact more energetic than mechanical kinetics predicts, and

• little evidence of water or ice in the excavated subsurface — a dry, consolidated, rocky interior.

What happened, in the proponents' telling: observers reported a small flare before the main flash; mission scientists described the blast as far brighter and more energetic than anticipated ("considerably more energetic than I expected," in one team member's words); and imaging showed a layered, consolidated, crater-marked surface. The Thunderbolts group published "Deep Impact — Confirming the Electric Comet" and has counted Tempel 1 as the theory's cleanest test ever since.

The mission team's own headline conclusions differed: spectrometers detected water ice and organics in the ejecta plume, and the standard interpretation treats the pre-flash and energetics as consistent with impact physics into a porous surface. Both readings of the same event are linked below — this is exactly the kind of case the reader should adjudicate directly.

The pattern proponents see across missions

• Stardust at Wild 2 (2004–2006): the returned dust contained high-temperature minerals — crystalline silicates and refractory inclusions of the kind formed in intense heat — from a body supposed to have condensed in the cold outer system. The mission's own scientists called it "fire and ice"; electric theorists read it as machined rock, not primordial frost.

• Deep Space 1 at Borrelly (2001): a hot, dry, dark surface — "no frozen water on the surface" in the team's reporting.

• Rosetta at 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko (2014–2016): a hard, dark, bone-dry sculpted surface that bounced the Philae lander; strikingly little exposed surface ice; jets erupting from cliffs and pits; unexpected findings like abundant molecular oxygen. Mainstream science places the ice safely below an insulating crust; electric theorists say the "snowball" has simply never been seen because it isn't there.

The cumulative argument is not that any one mission is inexplicable conventionally — it is that the electric model said in advance what comets would look like up close (rock, sculpture, surprise energetics), while the standard model was repeatedly surprised.

The electrochemistry of comets

For the electric-comet model the score is kept by the predictions — and proponents add that even the water detected around a comet need not come from buried ice. In the electric reading, some of it is produced by charge exchange and electrochemistry as the comet's discharge reacts with the solar wind (a version of this argument was made in an arXiv paper on Deep Impact's "large-scale electrochemistry"). The comet missions are where the model was put to its most direct test.

Related pages

The Electric Sun

The Electric Universe — An Introduction

The Thunderbolts Project — People and History

Sources & further reading

• "Predictions on Deep Impact" — the July 4, 2005 prediction page (TPOD)

• "Deep Impact — Confirming the Electric Comet" — the proponents' retrospective

• "Comet Tempel 1's Electrifying Impact" — Thornhill's analysis

• A'Hearn et al., "Deep Impact: Excavating Comet Tempel 1," Science 310 (2005) — the mission team's results

• Wal Thornhill & David Talbott, The Electric Universe (2007), ch. on electric comets