Hold your horses,------You're reading between the lines too much.
ok....sorry... ...
justcurious
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
viscount aero wrote:
CharlesChandler wrote:
justcurious wrote: And won't get annoyed that he doesn't know the fundamentals of electricity or how to do vector math.
Vector math isn't the problem — this is something that most CAD software developers (like myself) are pretty comfortable with. As concerns the fundamentals of electricity, my whole problem with "educated" folks is that I'm self-educated, which means that I didn't learn all of the same things, all in the same order. If there is something that I missed, that somebody else learned as a freshman in college, then I must not know anything at all. And yet this uneducated know-nothing has ongoing correspondences with research scientists who are encouraging him to continue with his work — how could that be? So don't dismiss me just yet. There are things that I should know that I don't. Then again, there are things that I shouldn't know that I do. I realize that this makes communicating difficult, but I should like to point out that you can't judge everybody by the highest grade level that they completed, as if it's one-dimensional. Like Sparky said, especially in a multi-disciplinary topic, you're likely to find odd combinations of intelligence and ignorance. To understand plasma, you have to know all disciplines, including fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, particle physics, and electromagnetism, to name a few. Nobody is an expert on all of that stuff. The only way to proceed is simply to take as little for granted as possible, and to insist on clear statements of all positions. Expect people to be wrong on a regular basis. This is scientific research. If we already understood it, it wouldn't be research. But we're not going to wait for the experts to work it out, and then we can get it all from a textbook, never needing to risk making fools of ourselves by venturing opinions before the experts weighed in. Rather, the experts aren't competing, because they've locked down on the standard approach (i.e., quantum mechanics, general relativity, and MHD), where the only redeeming value is that the constructs are so obtuse that it's hard to tell that scientists actually don't understand what's going on. So we're the ones who are pushing the envelope. Lurk & learn if you don't want to risk making a fool of yourself, but this is the frontier, where we keep trying new things until we find what works.
Cheers!
I don't think the basics of electricity are hard to understand. I understand it and I'm an artist. You have + and -, anode and cathode, and potential and movement of these charges creates electrical current. Current seeks a balance and will shed charge in order to find this balance. This shedding of potential can take the form of discharges such as lightning. That's the basics of electricity. One doesn't need a degree in something to understand it.
You guys are confusing the hell out of me. I am not judging anybody, I just made false assumptions that Charles was in some sort of formal science environment due to his dropping references to a lot of fancy articles and research papers. I even stated that I now have more respect for Charles, for someone with only a GED and a high speed connection I am really impressed. I also made the false assumption that people debating the physical phenomena surrounding the meteor event in Russia had some sort of scientific or engineering background. Knowing people's level of knowledge is important for better communication IMO. When I learned that you are an illustrator, it all of a sudden made sense to me that the vector math, cross products and so on were alien concepts to you. It's not an insult or a judgement, simply a fact that will help me better communicate. I NEVER said that someone "needs" a degree to understand any of this, self-learning is just as valid. In fact that is what I am doing. And no, you don't need a degree to understand electricity, but you need to know more than just charging and discharging that is for sure. When I don't know a topic very well, I have no problem admitting it. That is why I am not prepared (yet) to casually advance/promote my pet theories and speculations, I realize that I need to add quite a bit more to my toolkit. You can't teach a man who thinks he already knows everything. Anyways, this thread is all over the place and I keep getting misunderstood. I'm opting out.
viscount aero
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
justcurious wrote:
viscount aero wrote:
CharlesChandler wrote:
justcurious wrote: And won't get annoyed that he doesn't know the fundamentals of electricity or how to do vector math.
Vector math isn't the problem — this is something that most CAD software developers (like myself) are pretty comfortable with. As concerns the fundamentals of electricity, my whole problem with "educated" folks is that I'm self-educated, which means that I didn't learn all of the same things, all in the same order. If there is something that I missed, that somebody else learned as a freshman in college, then I must not know anything at all. And yet this uneducated know-nothing has ongoing correspondences with research scientists who are encouraging him to continue with his work — how could that be? So don't dismiss me just yet. There are things that I should know that I don't. Then again, there are things that I shouldn't know that I do. I realize that this makes communicating difficult, but I should like to point out that you can't judge everybody by the highest grade level that they completed, as if it's one-dimensional. Like Sparky said, especially in a multi-disciplinary topic, you're likely to find odd combinations of intelligence and ignorance. To understand plasma, you have to know all disciplines, including fluid dynamics, thermodynamics, particle physics, and electromagnetism, to name a few. Nobody is an expert on all of that stuff. The only way to proceed is simply to take as little for granted as possible, and to insist on clear statements of all positions. Expect people to be wrong on a regular basis. This is scientific research. If we already understood it, it wouldn't be research. But we're not going to wait for the experts to work it out, and then we can get it all from a textbook, never needing to risk making fools of ourselves by venturing opinions before the experts weighed in. Rather, the experts aren't competing, because they've locked down on the standard approach (i.e., quantum mechanics, general relativity, and MHD), where the only redeeming value is that the constructs are so obtuse that it's hard to tell that scientists actually don't understand what's going on. So we're the ones who are pushing the envelope. Lurk & learn if you don't want to risk making a fool of yourself, but this is the frontier, where we keep trying new things until we find what works.
Cheers!
I don't think the basics of electricity are hard to understand. I understand it and I'm an artist. You have + and -, anode and cathode, and potential and movement of these charges creates electrical current. Current seeks a balance and will shed charge in order to find this balance. This shedding of potential can take the form of discharges such as lightning. That's the basics of electricity. One doesn't need a degree in something to understand it.
You guys are confusing the hell out of me. I am not judging anybody, I just made false assumptions that Charles was in some sort of formal science environment due to his dropping references to a lot of fancy articles and research papers. I even stated that I now have more respect for Charles, for someone with only a GED and a high speed connection I am really impressed. I also made the false assumption that people debating the physical phenomena surrounding the meteor event in Russia had some sort of scientific or engineering background. Knowing people's level of knowledge is important for better communication IMO. When I learned that you are an illustrator, it all of a sudden made sense to me that the vector math, cross products and so on were alien concepts to you. It's not an insult or a judgement, simply a fact that will help me better communicate. I NEVER said that someone "needs" a degree to understand any of this, self-learning is just as valid. In fact that is what I am doing. And no, you don't need a degree to understand electricity, but you need to know more than just charging and discharging that is for sure. When I don't know a topic very well, I have no problem admitting it. That is why I am not prepared (yet) to casually advance/promote my pet theories and speculations, I realize that I need to add quite a bit more to my toolkit. You can't teach a man who thinks he already knows everything. Anyways, this thread is all over the place and I keep getting misunderstood. I'm opting out.
You don't need to opt out due to misunderstandings. The thread is going in a generally focused direction, ie, that of getting to what is behind the events that the vapor trail and sudden magnitude of brightness increases demonstrated. I think a lot of electrical phenomena occurred and it's important to sort it all out because it was largely simultaneous in nature.
From my vantage point, earlier and generally, you seemed to be bashing Charles when the discussion is about finding out what happened. I don't really care where Charles or you come from. Your experience is more important. I know good stuff when I hear it and each member has complimentary skill sets. Your input as an engineer is highly valuable and central to understanding what happened over Chelyabinsk.
The thrust of my skill sets are to visualize what is otherwise confusing or difficult to visualize. Conversely, most scientists who create diagrams are clueless to visualization of things (which are most often abstract) which makes their ideas that more confusing to understand when their diagrams are only designed for themselves to understand. I know what a vector is which is why the first diagram was all the more confusing as it was badly designed. Insofar as vector math, the symbols and meanings are more often foreign than familiar, as I described earlier with your use of "b field."
Anyway, this is beating a dead horse.
CharlesChandler
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
viscount aero wrote: The flashes and their corresponding locations within the vapor trail appear counter-intuitive.
I totally agree. I'm of the opinion at this point that it wasn't the flashes that left the trails. Rather, the process that left the trails terminated catastrophically, issuing the flashes. The first time it did this (i.e., frame #630, time 31:01.5), the whole thing got scaled way down, from the large to the small twin trails. The second time it did this (i.e., frame #673, time 31:03.0), the twin trails ceased to exist. A couple of remnants of the bolide continued on, the largest of which becoming visible in frame #725, time 31:05.0. But at that point, the bolide no longer had the where-with-all to flash and to leave a trail. So I'm not thinking of the flaming trails as part of the explosions per se. Rather, whatever left the trails also caused the explosions.
I also think that there had to be a physical separation between the aspect of the process that left the trails, and the aspect that produced the flare-ups. The reason is that at the point of the explosions, it just doesn't look like explosions happened there. Rather, it looks like the fire simply went out. So I keep going back to the Coulomb explosion inside a detached bow shock. The bolide itself was leaving the trails (perhaps because of the "rolling bolide dynamo" thing?). But when the Coulomb forces became too great, the thing disintegrated. Mass loss in the bolide itself reduced the size of the trails. And the positively charged matter that was pushed away from the bolide by the Coulomb force then recombined with the negative sheath, producing a huge flash. But the charge recombination out at the edge of the bow shock wouldn't have disrupted the trail being left by the bolide.
In other words, if you light a stick of dynamite and throw it through the air, and then quickly grab your super-slow-motion camera to get it all on film, you'll record a trail of smoke from the fuse, and then ba-boom you'll get a huge cloud from the explosion, thoroughly dispersing the trail from the fuse. But what if it's like fireworks, where there is a propellant to get the explosive up into the air, and then there is a small explosion to disperse the components, and then the components explode elsewhere, for their own reasons? The big oh-ah display never disrupted the trail from the launching propellant, because they were a long ways away from there when they exploded.
So I'm thinking that the bolide disintegrated due to the Coulomb force, and after the matter had radiated outward, to the edge of the detached bow shock, it ran into negative charges, where charge recombination produced a huge flash. Mass loss due to the disintegration reduced or eliminated the trails, but that's because all of the matter was busy elsewhere partaking in a flare up.
justcurious wrote: I was under the impression that Charles was some sort of Big Banger doing a Masters in "magnetic reconnection" LOL.
At first I didn't understand how you could have gotten that impression. Then I got to thinking that it was because of the way I (sometimes) integrate fluid dynamics and electromagnetism. Yet I consider MHD to be fighting words! Mainstream scientists are infatuated with MHD, because the way they do it, it's an abstraction, and they really like abstractions, and because it sounds really complicated, which makes them sound smart. But what I'm doing, and what they're doing, have never been in the same zip code. I'm attempting to identify the actual physical forces, and to sum up all of the effects. So just because mainstream MHD is all fairy dust doesn't mean that any consideration of the interplay between such forces is gibberish.
justcurious wrote: I did mention earlier that a lot of the footage of fiereballs out on the net shows flaring and also flashing (like a camera flash).
Oh, I didn't see that. I thought that fireballs were generally steady-state — my bad.
Sparky
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
Charles, I noticed that the bolide appeared to be "boiling/". Does that make sense with your model?
You have to advance through the sequence very slowly to see it. Maybe even magnify.
justcurious
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
Good video of how fire behaves under an electric field:
A typical camera flash tube, removed from its housing, looks like a miniature neon light.
I think the bright flash is the same as that produced by lightning. It's the same color, and they happen under the same gas/air environments, low altitude atmosphere. Same air, same color, already proven that plasma can produce these kinds of flashes (camera flashes). It's starting to get simpler and make more sense now. The flashing was puzzling me a bit.
A typical camera flash tube, removed from its housing, looks like a miniature neon light.
I think the bright flash is the same as that produced by lightning. It's the same color, and they happen under the same gas/air environments, low altitude atmosphere. Same air, same color, already proven that plasma can produce these kinds of flashes (camera flashes). It's starting to get simpler and make more sense now. The flashing was puzzling me a bit.
That's excellent. Thanks for your info indeed
This is apparently sinking in quite well. To review, if I have this correctly: The bolide's presence, its friction upon the atmosphere, created conditions that begot an electrical current (circuit). Electrons were stripped away from molecules in the air, ionizing the path--It's as simple as that. The rest is working out which gases did what and for how long, what recombined, when, etc.... and we will have the timeline of events reconstructed like a forensic investigation.
"The basic idea is to conduct electrical current — to move free electrons — through the gas in the tube, from one electrode to the other. As the free electrons move, they energize xenon atoms, causing the atoms to emit visible light photons (see How Light Works for details on how atoms generate photons).
You can't do this with the gas in its normal state, because it has very few free electrons — that is, nearly all the electrons are bonded to atoms, so there are almost no charged particles in the gas. To make the gas conductive, you have to introduce free electrons into the mix."
Well, guess what happened: The bolide/meteor made the atmosphere conductive by "introducing" free electrons. Both the camera flash bulb and the meteor work on the same principle. We saw a giant flash bulb going off in the sky.
from the article:
"The free electrons have a negative charge, so once they are free, they will move toward the positively charged terminal and away from the negatively charged terminal. As the electrons move, they collide with other atoms, causing these atoms to lose electrons as well, further ionizing the gas. The speeding electrons collide with xenon atoms, which become energized and generate light..."
They're talking about the anode/cathode relationship here, and the chain reaction of cause and effect when more and more free electrons beget the same.
This next part is interesting:
"To accomplish this, you need relatively high voltage (electrical "pressure"). It takes a couple hundred volts to move electrons between the two electrodes, and you need a few thousand volts to introduce enough free electrons to make the gas conductive."
Now we're getting somewhere deeper: voltage Imagine the voltage that was created by the bolide (would you reckon it was in the millions of volts?) That aspect hadn't occurred to me until reading this article. Notice how none of this remotely makes it into any press releases concerning the Chelyabinsk event--zero mention. Thank you again, justcurious.
justcurious
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
justcurious wrote: Good video of how fire behaves under an electric field:
At 1:50 minutes, notice that when the flame goes out, we can see the smoke is also ionized, you can have Birkeland currents of smoke!
I kept pondering on the twin smoke trails, contemplating why they look the same if one was made of electrons and the other of ions, until I saw this video. Silly me, the charged particles only make up a small percentage of a plasma. As we can see in the video, negatively or positively charged smoke looks the same. So in conclusion, the twin trails behind the meteor are negatively and positively. This is the reason there are two, and this is the reason their corkscrews or helical structures twist in opposite directions. It was my first hunch, but this little video helped confirm it.
viscount aero
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
justcurious wrote:
justcurious wrote: Good video of how fire behaves under an electric field:
At 1:50 minutes, notice that when the flame goes out, we can see the smoke is also ionized, you can have Birkeland currents of smoke!
I kept pondering on the twin smoke trails, contemplating why they look the same if one was made of electrons and the other of ions, until I saw this video. Silly me, the charged particles only make up a small percentage of a plasma. As we can see in the video, negatively or positively charged smoke looks the same. So in conclusion, the twin trails behind the meteor are negatively and positively. This is the reason there are two, and this is the reason their corkscrews or helical structures twist in opposite directions. It was my first hunch, but this little video helped confirm it.
Yes that's a very salient video to watch. In the case of the meteor its presence (friction) created the anode and cathode in the air as it ionized the atmosphere. The dual smoke columns became the fossil remains of the anode/cathode. This is also demonstrated in the rail gun experiment. No matter how you slice it this was an electrical event. It had to be as the ionization principle of a meteor's visible train has been known for decades. But somehow full explanation for such events goes suspiciously unmentioned in press releases and science classes. Astronomy curricula should defer to the railgun and candle videos, not icy dirtball or slow nebular collapse videos.
CharlesChandler
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
Sparky wrote: I noticed that the bolide appeared to be "boiling". Does that make sense with your model?
I haven't observed this, but a hypersonic bolide moving through air that varied in density (even slightly) would certainly produce a wavering shock front. Tell me which frames illustrate this, and I'll take a look.
justcurious wrote: The twin trails behind the meteor are negatively and positively [charged].
What created the anode on one side of the bolide, and the cathode on the other?
justcurious
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
CharlesChandler wrote:
justcurious wrote: The twin trails behind the meteor are negatively and positively [charged].
What created the anode on one side of the bolide, and the cathode on the other?
I think they are simply separated due to filamentation (pinch effect). Like charges (ie current) are attracted radially inwards and concentrating the trail, and opposite charges (opposite current) repelled radially outward. And vice versa. hence two trails. Why they are side by side, or one on top of the other etc I could not explain, but I think my explanation is valid for "why two seperate trails".
viscount aero
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
justcurious wrote:
CharlesChandler wrote:
justcurious wrote: The twin trails behind the meteor are negatively and positively [charged].
What created the anode on one side of the bolide, and the cathode on the other?
I think they are simply separated due to filamentation (pinch effect). Like charges (ie current) are attracted radially inwards and concentrating the trail, and opposite charges (opposite current) repelled radially outward. And vice versa. hence two trails. Why they are side by side, or one on top of the other etc I could not explain, but I think my explanation is valid for "why two seperate trails".
I agree; moreover, it seems to me the ionization effect itself created the charge separation (which is an electrical circuit akin to the flash bulb) into anode/cathode and the 2 columns resulted due to that, similar to what the rail gun diagram describes.
Beata-at-home
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
I am late jumping in on this thread, but have briefly read through the posts here. Is the word "missile" taboo here,or did I misunderstand your communications about it? There has been speculation about the nature of the projectile.
Doesn't it make a difference in the analysis if the projectile had originated from within Earth's atmosphere? Or would that kind of missile suggested in above site be shot out of the atmosphere before re-entry?
viscount aero
Re: Feb 15 Meteorite(s) hit Russia - Analysis
Beata-at-home wrote: I am late jumping in on this thread, but have briefly read through the posts here. Is the word "missile" taboo here,or did I misunderstand your communications about it? There has been speculation about the nature of the projectile.
Doesn't it make a difference in the analysis if the projectile had originated from within Earth's atmosphere? Or would that kind of missile suggested in above site be shot out of the atmosphere before re-entry?
...
As concerns the fundamentals of electricity, my whole problem with "educated" folks is that I'm self-educated, which means that I didn't learn all of the same things, all in the same order. If there is something that I missed, that somebody else learned as a freshman in college, then I must not know anything at all.
