© Lloyd

==SOLAR SPICULES
__Earl Milton wrote: In order to maintain a stable sheath between the photosphere and the corona a great many electrons must flow downward through the sheath for each ion which passes upward.
__The solar gas shows an increasing percentage of ionized-to-neutral atoms with altitude.
__Some of the rising neutral atoms become ionized by collision.
__Some fall back to the solar surface.
__The rising ions ascend into the corona where they become the solar wind.
__The descending gas flows back to the Sun between the granules - in these channels the electrical field is such that ions straying out from the sides of the photospheric tufts flow sunward and hence the electrons flow outward.
__The presence of these channels is critical to the maintenance of the solar discharge….
__Here we have an explanation for the spicules huge fountains that spit electrons high into the corona.
__Solar: In 1979 Ralph Juergens wrote The Photosphere: Is it the Top or Bottom of the Phenomenon We Call the Sun?
__In that seminal work he first proposed that solar spicules are actually the way that the Sun re-supplies its electrical potential and maintains its photospheric double layer.
__In the image at the top of the page an unmistakable twist can be seen in the largest spicule identifying it as a Birkeland filament.
__In past Thunderbolts Picture of the Day articles we have noted that these towering filaments are responsible for the transmission of electrical energy throughout the Sun the solar system and the galactic environment. – "Spicules Complete the Circuit
__Nice video of "spicules" here...
__CC: I need to see a scale diagram of this identifying the charged regions and a description of the charge separation mechanism.
__Then I'll want to know what prevents the catastrophic release of all of the potential.
__CC: they didn't show any evidence of the sunward electrons actually making it to the Sun.
__And when counter-streaming was observed it was the exception rather than the rule.
__So this could more easily be taken as a refutation of the solar anode model than a confirmation of it.
__The "spicules" that we see sometimes near active regions are the form that I'm talking about.
__But the flow in spicules is outward and [spicules] are the exception rather than the rule.
__CC: I think that streamers are electrons generated by thermionic emissions from the photosphere accelerated away from the sun by electrostatic repulsion from an underlying body of negative charge and attracted to positive plasma in the heliosphere.
__So these are fundamentally different from spicules where the pinching is at the photosphere.
__And both of those are fundamentally different from coronal loops with both footpoints in the photosphere (or below).