Science

1) This is a mix of a straw-man argument (no reputable astrophysicist would argue that "everything we see in the heavens are the results of friction, shock-waves, and gravity alone&quot and a confusion between the names and definitions of units and what they stand for.

First, anything naturally measured in Amperes is going to be a current of some kind; could you give an example of its use by an astrophysicist in a context that implies there's no electrical phenomenon involved?

Second, the electron-volt is simply a unit of energy that's extremely handy when talking about the energy of individual atoms and subatomic particles. Its definition is in terms of an electrical thought experiment, but its use is by no means limited to systems with electromagnetic interactions. And its value has no electrical units "under the hood;" a volt is a joule per coulomb, and an electron volt is the product of a volt with the electron charge, so it's simply equivalent to some number of joules (kg m^2/s^2).

The name comes from the thought experiment I alluded to: an electron at a potential of 1V has an electrostatic potential energy of 1 eV. Perhaps the best way to think about this is to imagine releasing an electron (absent other interactions) from rest and looking at its kinetic energy (= 0.5 m v^2) after it accelerates across a potential difference of 1 V; that kinetic energy equals 1 eV, but it is energy associated with the moving mass of the electron. And if you plug in the numbers, you find out that the kinetic energy is 1.6 x 10^-19 joules. eV and joules are just different units for exactly the same thing! Astrophysicists use eV rather than joules for many reasons, but mainly because joules are units that give easy-to-use numbers when talking about energies of macroscopic objects moving at low speeds, while eV give manageable numbers when talking about molecules, atoms and smaller particles.

It's also customary to make use of Einstein's E=mc^2 to make a handier mass unit than kg. For instance, an electron has a mass of 9.11 x 10^-31 kg. That's an obnoxiously tiny number! But if we recognize that m=E/c^2 we can take the rest energy of the electron as another way of denoting the mass, and if we put that energy in eV and just carry through the c^2 we end up with much "nicer" numbers to work with. So that same electron has a rest energy of 511,000 eV (511 keV or 0.511 MeV); we can thus say its mass is 511 keV/c^2.

2) From your link: "the emission comes from the "charge exchange" between neutral atoms and molecules in the comet's coma and highly ionized O, C, N, Ne, Si, and Mg ions in the solar wind that is streaming by the comet." In other words, you have highly-energetic charged particles slamming into the comet... which is pretty much a recipe for making X-rays, right?

As for the gamma ray burst thing - yup, we don't understand everything. Isn't that great? There's a lot to be discovered out there. But it's not because astrophysicists are making profession-wide amateur mistakes about the nature of electromagnetism.