OF THE
TIMES
Traces of this movement can be found in the late 19th century,when Scientific American published an article stating that Professor Zollner of Leipzig ascribed the 'self-luminosity' of comets to 'electrical excitement.' Zollner proposed that:The following article by Mr Lescaudron sheds more light on the topic: The Seven Destructive Earth Passes of Comet Venus...the nuclei of comets, as masses, are subject to gravitation, while the vapors developed from them, which consist of very small particles, yield to the action of the free electricity of the sunThen, regarding comet tails, the August 11th 1882 issue of English Mechanic and World of Science included the following:There seems to be a rapidly growing feeling amongst physicists that both the self-light of comets and the phenomena of their tails belong to the order of electrical phenomena.In 1896, Nature published an article stating:It has long been imagined that the phenomenon of comet's tails are in some way due to a solar electrical repulsion, and additional light is thrown on this subject by recent physical researches.[...]
So, comets don't seem to be dirty snowballs after all. From the data presented above, they are glowing chunks of rock. On the other side, asteroids don't seem to be the non-glowing chunks of rocks posited by mainstream science. For example asteroids P/2013 P5 recently puzzled the whole scientific community when it started exhibiting a million miles long glowing tail. To rationalize this oddity official science claimed the asteroid was spinning so fast that it was ejecting tons of dust, while acknowledging that finally the difference between 'comets' and 'asteroids' might not be so clear-cut.1
The fundamental difference between asteroids and comets is not their chemical composition, i.e. dirty, fluffy icy comets vs. rocky asteroids. Rather, as has long been put forward by plasma theorists, what differentiates 'comets' from 'asteroids' is their electric activity.
When the electric potential difference between an asteroid and the surrounding plasma is not too high, the asteroid exhibits a dark discharge mode2 or no discharge at all. But when the potential difference is high enough, the asteroid switches to a glowing discharge mode.3 At this point the asteroid is a comet. From this perspective, a comet is simply a glowing asteroid and an asteroid is a non-glowing comet. Thus the very same body can, successively, be a comet, then an asteroid, then a comet, etc., depending on variation in the ambient electric field it is subjected to.4
Note that a comet can also exhibit the third plasma discharge mode, namely lightning or 'arc discharge mode', which is probably what happened when Comet Shoemaker-Levy entered the vicinity of Jupiter in July 1994:
Comment: More from Dembski and Ewert: