Acksblog

In the last fifteen years, I have been led on a great intellectual adventure. Inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky’s Worlds in Collision, I began a search of ancient myth for the truth about how recent planetary encounters affected the Earth and mankind. This quest led to the revealing of a sequence of close encounters of Venus, Mars and Mercury with the Earth from about 4000 to 700 BC. The physical implications of these encounters in turn has led to a completely new perspective on the origins and makeup of the planets in our solar system. The intricate detail of these encounters – how they were triggered, the number of encounters, the disposal of the bodies and most importantly the realization that they resulted in the rejuvenation of the Earth, has made clear the very real intrusions of Yehovah into the world, which are described in the Bible. Only recently have I come to the realization that the make-up of the giant planets may lead to the explanation of a universal cosmic mystery, dark matter.

A 3000-year period of cosmic chaos was triggered by the impact of a giant asteroid or rogue planet on Jupiter, the rebounded plasma cloud from which condensed into proto-Venus. This flaming ball of molten rock carried much of the excess energy of the impact into the inner solar system, initiating an ‘organized’ chaos throughout the Bronze and Iron ages. This event explains the origin of all the terrestrial planets in a completely new way. But the most significant fact vis-a-vis dark matter are the implications for the makeup of the giant planets.

Because of their low average densities, astrophysicists have all accepted the notion that Jupiter and Saturn are ‘gas giants,’ comprising exotic states of hydrogen. But the rebound of proto-Venus from the impact on Jupiter implies that it is a solid body comprising a form of matter which is not currently understood. There is considerable observational evidence pointing to its solid nature, but the entire scientific ‘priesthood’ continues to ignore it. So they explain-away the Great Red Spot as a ‘storm,’ in spite of the fact that it has remained at the same latitude for 350 years, they claim that Jupiter’s great energy excess is ‘primordial,’ and have completely failed to explain the multiple zonal wind bands, the existence of which require a solid surface below the clouds.

An obvious clue to the makeup of both Jupiter and Saturn are in ‘plain sight’ of our telescopes and deep-space probes. All of their satellites and rings are acknowledged to comprise primarily water-ice, including the enormous Galilean ‘moons’ which are comparable in volume with Mercury and the Moon. Where do they think the water came from? It is so obvious that these all formed as a result of impacts on the primaries (Jupiter and Saturn), which splashed the water into orbits around them. Most startlingly, the enormous Galilean moons were formed by material ejected at the date of the birth of proto-Venus, less than 6000 years ago.

Gas Hydrates
The low densities of the giant planets obviously implies that the water-ice comprising them has properties different from normal ice. It is not difficult to determine this state. There is an obvious candidate, a solid form of water on Earth, which has been the object of considerable research in recent decades because of its potential as an energy source. These are called gas hydrates. They are defined as follows:

Natural gas hydrates are solids that form from a combination of water and one or more hydrocarbon or non-hydrocarbon gases. In physical appearance, gas hydrates resemble packed snow or ice. In a gas hydrate, the gas molecules are “caged” within a crystal structure composed of water molecules. Sometimes gas hydrates are called “gas clathrates”. Clathrates are substances in which molecules of one compound are completely “caged” within the crystal structure of another. Therefore, gas hydrates are one type of clathrate.

Per unit volume, gas hydrates contain a tremendous amount of gas. For example, 1 cubic meter of hydrate disassociates at atmospheric temperature and pressure to form 164 cubic meter of natural gas + 0.8 cubic meters of water (Kvenvolden, 1993).  [webmineral.com gives the empiracle ula 8(CH4) 46(H2O)]

The natural gas component of gas hydrates is typically dominated by methane, but other natural gas components (e.g., ethane, propane, CO2) can also be incorporated into a hydrate.

Gas hydrates require high pressure and low temperatures, exactly the conditions within the giant planets. The ‘foreign’ molecules, such as methane, are essential for their formation. But the evidence suggests that this property allowed the giant planets, particularly Jupiter, to capture most of the heavy elements in the nascent solar system in its interior. The presence of heavy elements is implied by early human observations of proto-Venus condensing from an enormous plasma cloud which rebounded from the impact on Jupiter, 6000 years ago. Recently, a wide range of heavy element spectra were observed some six minutes after the larger fragments of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impacted Jupiter’s surface. The delay was due to the time required for the towering mushroom clouds to rise above the cloud-tops and become visible.

Based on the quote above, the density of Jupiter would only be 0.80 gm/cm^3 if it comprised pure gas hydrate, but assuming most of the heavy elements became incorporated in it, plus a small degree of compression in the deep interior, could result in its actual average density, 1.33 gm/cm^3.   The fact that the average density of Saturn is only 0.6873 gm/cm^3 implies that it is almost pure methane clathrate with a thick atmosphere to inflate its apparent volume.  The logical conclusion is that the heavy elements in the nascent were only blown out to the radius of Jupiter.  The heavy elements, in the form of dust particles, acted as catalysts on which primordial atomic hydrogen, H, became molecular hydrogen H2, and subsequently water ice. Thus each dust grain became the nucleus of an ice crystal, many of which adhered to form ‘snowflakes.’  Thus the very famaliar tendency of snowflakes to stick to one another made it possible for accretion of the giant planets to begin at the smallest scale – something that the dust particles alone could never do. Thus there was a beautiful symbiotic relationship between the dust particles and the atomic hydrogen and oxygen that made possible the accretion of the giant planets.  This was the only accretion in the solar system.

Terrestrial Planet Formation
The encapsulation of all the heavy elements within the gas hydrates made possible the later formation of the terrestrial planets by unique impacts on the giant planets, probably Jupiter. The terrestrial planets rebound from these impacts as very hot (>10,000 K) plasma clouds and temporarily lose the much more plentiful lighter elements, up to about 20 amu, in the form of multi-million mile-long, black comet-tails.  These lighter elements are those destined to become the surface layers, oceans and atmosphere of the terrestrial planet.  As the proto-planet cools, it sweeps up and recaptures these lighter elements on its surface.  Because water dominates within Jupiter (210 of its 318 Earth-masses are oxygen)  vast oceans form on the terrestrial planets and because considerable sodium and chlorine were also lost to space, the oceans are salty from the beginning. This explains two great mysteries which astrophysicists cannot currently explain – the origin of the vast amount of water in our oceans and why it is salty.

Water, Water Everywhere
The significant point relative to the question of dark matter is that the giant planets comprise primarily water, good old H2O, and therefore vast amounts of water are present in our solar system and in every planetary nebula.  I estimate the total oxygen in the four giant planets to be approximately 290 Earth masses.  This should not be surprising, since oxygen and hydrogen are two of the three most abundant atomic species in the universe. Astrophysicists today believe that the only oxygen in the outer solar system is that present in as water ice within Uranus and Neptune and the satellites and rings of Jupiter and Saturn.

Two relatively recent discoveries by space telescopes provide additional clues to the watery nature of the universe:

In Jan 2007 UC Berkeley astronomers announced that the 12 million year-old red dwarf AU Microscopii was surrounded by a disk with the texture of ‘fluffy snow,’ determined by studying the polarization of the reflected light.  The adjective did not necessarily mean that they thought it was water, only ‘dust.  I maintain that this was water in its pre-accretion state (snowflakes).

Evidence of water vapour swirling around a nearby star has been seen by the Submillimeter Wave Astronomy Satellite (SWAS), a small radio observatory launched by NASA in 1998. Its sensors have focused on a giant star, designated IRC+10216 (CW Leonis) located 500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Leo. This is a red giant which is expanding in its death-throes, consuming the planets which once orbited it.

“What makes the results we are reporting so unusual is that we have found a cloud of water vapour around a star where we would not ordinarily have expected to find water,” said Gary Melnick of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

“It seems that the water vapour comes from icy comets that are melting due to the heat from the star, which is much hotter than our Sun … There must be about four Earth-masses of frozen water around IRC+10216 to produce the vapour cloud we see,” said Melnick.

“According to calculations, the comets circling IRC+10216 have a total mass broadly similar to the original mass of our Solar System’s Kuiper Belt, a collection of only 1,000 known icy bodies circling our Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune.  Astrophysicists estimate that there are as many as 70,000 such bodies.”

This quote reflects modern astrophysicists view of our solar system – that water is only present in the form of comets, satellites of the giant planets and in icy bodies imagined to exist in the Kuiper Belt.   Given that world-view, the large amount of water in CW Leonis is difficult to explain.  I maintain that what is happening in CW Leonis is that the expanding red giant is vaporizing its giant planets, thereby revealing their enormous water content. This rare event is making visible a large amount of water because the heat of the star is converting it to a gaseous form for a brief period which allows it to be identified by infra-red spectrometers.

But most water in space is in the form of ice particles. As soon as the water vapor temperature drops below freezing, molecules combine to form ice and when it drops to values typical of space, the vapor pressure becomes infinitesimally small. This means that ice particles do not sublime to release gaseous water vapor, rendering it invisible to any spectrometers. If clouds of ice particles are optically thick, as in the case of AU Microscopii, they can be imaged by reflected light. Astronomers refer to these as dust clouds, but have no idea that they comprise mostly water. Thus vast clouds of water exist in deep space and remain invisible to our observations.

Dark Matter?
The lack of understanding of the mass of material in the universe is reflected in our own solar system.  Currently astrophycists believe that the amount of water in the solar system is that comprising a fraction of Uranus, Neptune and the satellites and rings of Jupiter and Saturn, perhaps 22 Earth-masses.  If the giant planets are primarily methane gas hydrates, the mass of water is close to 325 Earth-masses. During the lifetime of the universe, innumerable planetary systems have formed and died.  Although early planetary systems did not have as much oxygen available at their formation as our own, more and more oxygen was produced in each star, to the point at which our Sun was able to produce the vast amount of oxygen evidenced by the gas hydrate makeup of the giant planets.  The vast amount of oxygen produced in the fifteen billion years since the big bang and blasted into intergalactic space as each one died, not just from the giant planets, which are but an indication of the vast amount of oxygen in their stars, which obviously contained infinitely more oxygen.  I suggest that the ‘dark matter, the ‘invisible’ mass infusing each galaxy is primarily water crystals. The elemental abundances within the stars favor the formation of water over all other molecules when they cool down. This means that when stars die, they produce water and that new stars are created from clouds of water.

Studies of the milky-way galaxy estimate that the mass of dark matter is between 1.0 and 0.25 that of visible (luminous) matter.  It has been suggested that the dark matter in the disk might be due to dim stars, such as white, black and brown dwarfs, but this is doubtful.

Dark matter was originally imagined to comprise exotic new types of particles, called ‘WIMPS’ (weakly interacting massive particles), that were possibly large but undetectable, maybe even floating under our noses. However, recent studies of galaxy clusters indicate that the particles must be very small. This is another clue pointing to conventional molecules, particularly water, as the source of dark matter.