The Craters are Electric | Space News
The ravaged surfaces of solid bodies in space tell stories, stories that demand valid interpretations in order to decipher. A dramatic type of feature observed on every solid body is a crater, a depression that seems to speak to some violent event in the distant past. The so-called debate in planetary science only ever entertained two possible causes of craters: impacts, or volcanism. But on all of these bodies, we have observed craters lacking any conventional explanation. In this companion piece to the forthcoming eighth installment of our series The Universe is Electric, we explore the experimental evidence that interplanetary electrical discharges produced many, if not most planetary craters.