Lloyd wrote: Do you agree that the heliosphere is a plasma cell?
Yes.
Lloyd wrote: ...a brown dwarf encountering the heliosphere for the first time would or could have flared on contact.
Yes, anything moving fast enough, and encountering a radical difference in potential, could flare.
Lloyd wrote: is it possible that the heliosphere surface could have been wavy enough for Saturn to have penetrated several waves while entering at a low angle to the heliosphere surface?
It wouldn't even need to enter at a low angle. The Voyager data are indicating that the heliopause is turbulent. So an object entering with extreme velocity could flare multiple times as it passed through a variety of small cells in the turbulent heliopause.
Lloyd wrote: Am I right that you've said that interstellar and interplanetary media are positive charged, while planetoids and stars are negative? If so, did you also say it's because of photo-ionization? Or would it be by the process that Bridgman mentioned, in which electrons are able to move much faster and farther than positive ions, so they naturally tend to separate in a gaseous environment? And then those separated electrons tend to attract to planetoids and stars initially by gravity and by the "like^3" principle?
I don't know about the interstellar medium — I "think" that it is quasi-neutral (photo-ionized, but with equal quantities of both charges, a.k.a., "net neutral"). The interplanetary medium appears to be net positive, though infinitesimally so, at least by electrostatic standards. Most astronomers would say that it's net neutral, but recent research indicates that it has a slight positive charge. Its electrons were stripped off when the interstellar wind impinged on the solar wind, and interstellar nucleons burrowed deeper into the solar wind than the electrons. Therefore, there is a layer of negative charge in the heliopause, from all of those electrons that got stripped off. The charge density there is much greater, since in that layer are all of the electrons that the entire rest of the heliosphere is missing. So the interior of the heliosphere has a large volume with a small positive charge density, while the heliopause has a much smaller volume, and therefore a much greater negative charge density, since the total charges match.
I don't recall Bridgman's statement, but it sounds like he was talking about Debye sheaths, which are positively charged halos that form around solid particles, because the fast-moving electrons from the halo can get lost in the electron cloud of the solid particle, leaving the particle negative, and the halo positive. Out in space, the most common source of free electrons is photo-ionization. So the sequence of sub-atomic events is: photo-ionization, which liberates electrons, which move much more rapidly than nucleons, and therefore impact nearby solid particles more frequently, leaving the particle negative and the surrounding plasma positive.
The "like-likes-like" force then comes into play, since neighboring negative particles are attracted to their shared Debye sheaths. But this will not cause accretion immediately. The LLL force only operates at a distance. When the negative particles get close enough together that the positive sheaths have been squeezed out, the net force is repulsive. So the only way that the LLL force could cause the condensation of a star or planet would be to build up enough momentum that the matter overshoots its electrostatic equilibrium, and condenses in spite of the repulsive force at short ranges. If it does, then yes, the star/planet will still be bearing the negative charge of the particles from which it condensed, and its newly formed atmosphere will have the positive charge of all of the Debye sheaths that were squeezed out when the matter condensed.
Lloyd wrote: How do the plasmasphere surfaces of plasma cells form?
There has to be a charge separation mechanism, and some resistance to maintain it.
Lloyd wrote: Would they form only from stellar and planetary winds, like the solar wind? Would the plasmasphere surfaces be electric double layers with positive inside and negative outside?
Plasma cells can form anywhere. For example, in the heliopause, and in the bow shock of a supersonic bolide, the charge separator is just the Newtonian force of colliding particles, where nucleons burrow deeper into the plasma than electrons, making the interior of the cell positively charged, surrounded by a layer of negative charge formed by the electrons that were stripped off. In a thunderstorm, the charge separator is the action of gravity on charged water particles, which pulls the heavier particles down, and thus away, from lighter particles. The heavier particles (e.g., hail) are negatively charged, and if these are pulled down, it leaves a net positive charge at the top of the cloud. Then a "screening layer" of negative charge gets organized on top of the cloud, attracted to the positive charges in the anvil, but not able to recombine right away, due to the resistance of the air. So a thunderstorm is a plasma cell.
Lloyd wrote: Would the layers be stationary, or would they tend to flow in opposite directions as in electric filaments? Would the plasma cell surfaces tend to form filaments, or sheets? If sheets, could the sheets develop waves, such as from the approach of large objects and would such waves accelerate outward?
To answer these questions in a particular circumstance, you have to go back to the prime mover(s). A plasma cell is just charge-separated matter, where the opposite charges cling together due to the electric force, but cannot recombine right away due to the resistance. So it is an attractive force, but with buffering. To know what the cell as a whole is going to do, you have to look at the external factors. For example, a thunderstorm is a plasma cell, but to know what the storm as a whole is going to do, you have to look at which way the external winds are blowing. In the heliopause, we'd expect things to be more or less stationary, but with some turbulence due to irregularities in the wafts of solar and interstellar winds colliding. This could create waves, or bubbles, or who knows what else. But in a plasma cell, opposite charges move together in the same direction, bound to each other by the electric force, but buffered from each other by the resistance.
To get a "twisted pair" filament, such as in a Birkeland current, the charge separator has to be relativistic velocities, generating extremely powerful magnetic fields that pull like charges together, and push opposite charges apart. This puts the electric and magnetic forces in opposition. Thus there is charge separation, but also buffering.
Due to the difference in mass between nucleons and electrons, the magnetic pressure will get the lighter charge stream to spiral around the heavier one, producing the "twisted pair" current. I "guess" you could still call this a plasma cell, but the electrodynamics of it are better described simply as a Birkeland current.
I have no idea what to make of this, since I'm so new to the topic of continent building.
Lloyd wrote: Could a brown dwarf star encountering plasma cell double layers cause ion compressed matter inside it to explode to produce a flare and a rain of detritus?
I think that we can answer the question by looking at what happens to the 3.43 × 107 kg/s yield from CMEs, and I don't see any mountain building from solar wind. It's possible that the Earth is gaining mass from such particles, but I'm not sure that the rate is sufficient for continent building in a few thousand years.
Lloyd wrote: If such an explosion started in ion compressed matter in a brown dwarf, would there be ways to stop it from exploding the entire star?
If it's a Coulomb explosion, due to a strong positive charge through the body, the whole thing gets blown apart. If it's just an electrostatic discharge, you might get some surface EDM, but not an explosion, and nothing that you would call detritus.
Lloyd wrote: Since the SL9 comet fragments formed a line in single file before they hit Jupiter in 1994...
This was one of the things that lured me into the study of astronomy in the first place — I couldn't understand how tidal forces could break up a comet, because I couldn't understand how gravity could be more powerful than the covalent bonding that holds a solid together. I'm now of the opinion that SL9 broke up due to the internal Coulomb force when it entered Jupiter's atmosphere and the detached bow shock sucked the electrons out of the comet.
Lloyd wrote: Do you think it's plausible that Venus, Mars and Earth could have followed behind dwarf star Saturn in single file?
I think that the momentum of celestial bodies is far and away the largest energy source, and which can only be altered by impacts, or by lesser forces operating over extremely long periods of time.
Lloyd wrote: Does the plasma tube between the planets seem plausible?
I'm not sure that it's possible. If the planets are self-contained plasma cells, they show no electric field beyond their outer atmospheres. With no interplanetary electric field, there isn't going to be a discharge.
D_Archer wrote: The Anode is outflow and the Cathode is inflow. The solar wind proves the Sun is anode.
It isn't that simple. Typically, there is an outflow of positive charges from an anode (and/or an inflow of negative charges). If you sample the solar wind, you'll find both charges, but that doesn't tell you anything. In a current-carrying wire, the atoms are neutrally charged, and the current is instantiated by the flow of electrons. So you have to determine which way the charges are flowing. In the case of the solar wind, where everything is flowing outward, you have to figure out whether positive or negative charges are flowing faster. In plasma, there isn't an instrument (to my knowledge) that can incontrovertibly determine this. Electron velocities are greater anyway, due to the smaller mass, but they tend to bounce around within the plasma. If all of it is moving in the same direction, and you measured the velocity of impacts of nucleons and electrons, the electron velocity would be greater, even if there wasn't any net current. The easiest way to determine the direction of the current is to simply measure the electric field. But out in space, instruments get surrounded by shielding layers (i.e., they become insulated plasma cells), and the strongest field is entirely within the cell. It gets more complicated still if the reason for the "current" wasn't an electric field, but rather, something like a CME that accelerated positive charges away from the Sun, and the electrons flowed outward to catch up. During the CME, you could think of the Sun as an anode, expelling positive charges. After the CME, the Sun becomes a cathode, expelling negative charges. At some distance from the Sun, the negative charges catch up to the positive charges, and when the electrons slam into the nucleons, the nucleons are accelerated. Now you have both charges moving away from the Sun in a quasi-neutral plasma, but can you call it a current?
The bottom line is that we have to look at all of the data, and observe the form of the discharge, in order to determine the polarity.
Lloyd wrote: Is Scott's PNP transistor meant to equate the photosphere and corona to positive and the chromosphere to negative?
I'm not sure that he got that specific about it.
Lloyd wrote: Do both sides consider the photosphere to be positive tufts, one being positive tufts on an anode and the other positive tufts on a cathode?
I think so, but you'll have to ask Thornhill for more specificity on the Electric Sun model. I'm definitely saying that the granular surface of the Sun is a positive double-layer clinging tightly to an underlying negative layer, and where the net charge is negative, but the visible characteristics at the surface are defined by the behaviors of positive charges clinging to a cathode. The ES model says the Sun is positive, and leaves it at that. Hence we'd be putting words in Thornhill's mouth if we were to say that the granules are the positive electrode (and not the anode glow, which occurs in a negative double-layer). So he'll have to elaborate.
Lloyd wrote: From this it seems that it might be best not to use the terms anode or cathode.
I agree that these terms are confusing. To be clear, I'm saying that the Sun has a net negative charge, with a flow of electrons out of the Sun, and where ohmic heating in a positive double-layer generates the heat and light that we receive from the Sun. The top of the positive double-layer is the visible surface, which is granular.
Lloyd
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
Thanks for the helpful replies again, Charles.
Saturn at Heliopause Here are some of the main claims. According to Cardona, before the 10k BP Saturn flare at the heliopause (as Saturn was entering from outside) Saturn was seen by the ancients above the north pole as a dim globe, usually reddish in color I think. After that event, which involved several flares: - Venus was seen for the first time on the face of Saturn as the last flare subsided, - Saturn was somewhat brighter than before, - it developed a circumstellar disk that from Earth looked like an ocean that Saturn floated on, - the Sun was seen (going around the Earth due to Earth's rotation) as a distant star, the only star visible, - eventually Mars appeared in front of Venus, - and a plasma column appeared between some or all of the 4 planets.
Comet SL9 & Comet Saturn Wikipedia says:
... the Shoemakers and Levy discovered Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 on the night of March 24, 1993 in a photograph ... ... The discovery image gave the first hint that comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 was an unusual comet, as it appeared to show multiple nuclei in an elongated region about 50 arcseconds long and 10 arcseconds wide. ... Its orbit around Jupiter was very loosely bound, with a period of about 2 years and an apojove (the point in the orbit farthest from the planet) of 0.33 astronomical units (49,000,000 km). Its orbit around the planet was highly eccentric (e = 0.9986).[5] ... Tracing back the comet's orbital motion revealed that it had been orbiting Jupiter for some time. It seems most likely that it was captured from a solar orbit in the early 1970s, [or] as early as the mid-1960s. ... The comet had apparently passed extremely close to Jupiter on July 7, 1992, just over 40,000 km (25,000 mi) above the planet's cloud tops – a smaller distance than Jupiter's radius of 70,000 km (43,000 mi), and well within the orbit of Jupiter's innermost moon Metis and the planet's Roche limit, inside which tidal forces are strong enough to disrupt a body held together only by gravity.[9]
Charles, do you agree that the SL9 fragments followed each other in single file for the next 2 years after the 1992 perijove until they crashed into Jupiter? If you agree, do you know what forces would tend to hold them in line like that? Why would the slingshot effect at the 1992 perijove not have scattered the fragments in many different directions?
Could a similar pattern of forces, like those that affected SL9, have kept Saturn, Earth and probably Mars (though not visible at first) lined up axially both before and after penetrating the heliosphere (so that the planets always appeared to be above the north pole)?
Plasma Column Could a plasma column have formed between the 4 planets (after they entered the heliosphere) the way comet tails form? - Or could Venus have produced geysers like Io and other moons do, such as those that feed the rings in Saturn's disk, and could the geyser have produced the plasma column (as well as the later ring of smoke around Saturn, called the Ouroboros)?
Saturn Detritus on Earth When I asked: If ... an explosion started in ion compressed matter in a brown dwarf, would there be ways to stop it from exploding the entire star[?], you replied: If it's a Coulomb explosion, due to a strong positive charge through the body, the whole thing gets blown apart. If it's just an electrostatic discharge, you might get some surface EDM, but not an explosion, and nothing that you would call detritus.
You've already theorized that volcanoes on Earth are caused by something like pressure changes on the ion compressed matter below the Moho. So instead of comparing Saturn flares to the Sun's CMEs, how about comparing them to Earth's volcanic eruptions? Would Saturn have been more Sun-like or Earth-like? Could not Saturn have had volcanic-like eruptions along with the flares that would have rained detritus on Earth and formed a circumstellar disk around Saturn?
Saturn Runaway Star? Could Saturn have been a runaway or hypervelocity star? Wikipedia says:
Ordinary stars in the galaxy have velocities on the order of 100 km/s, while hypervelocity stars (especially those near the center of the galaxy, which is where most are thought to be produced), have velocities on the order of 1000 km/s. ... [Such stars could be the] result of a merging with a collision between the Milky Way and an orbiting dwarf galaxy.
Such a star running into a stellar plasmasphere should be more strongly affected than a normal star would. Right?
Is this subject interesting enough to seem worth spending some time to figure out what parts of the Saturn Theory need to be tweaked?
starbiter
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
This talk by Bob Johnson at EU 2013 is thought provoking.
Lloyd wrote: Charles, do you agree that the SL9 fragments followed each other in single file for the next 2 years after the 1992 perijove until they crashed into Jupiter? If you agree, do you know what forces would tend to hold them in line like that? Why would the slingshot effect at the 1992 perijove not have scattered the fragments in many different directions?
Bodies traveling single-file like that is one of the expectations of the "like-likes-like" principle. If the fragments were negatively charged, as we would expect them to be while still out in space, and if they had positively charged Debye sheaths around them, the fragments were all attracted to their shared Debye sheaths. But this force is strongest in a linear arrangement, because the Debye sheaths are concentrated between the "beads along the string", and not repelled from each other. If one of the beads got out of line, electric pressure would have pushed it back into line.
Lloyd wrote: Could a similar pattern of forces, like those that affected SL9, have kept Saturn, Earth and probably Mars (though not visible at first) lined up axially both before and after penetrating the heliosphere (so that the planets always appeared to be above the north pole)?
Then what broke them out of that arrangement? FWIW, I think that it's a subtle force, and certainly if you're talking about planets, their existing momenta will be far stronger. You're talking about such a brief time-span that the forces necessary to alter the trajectories of such large objects would have to be unbelievable.
Lloyd wrote: Could a plasma column have formed between the 4 planets (after they entered the heliosphere) the way comet tails form? - Or could Venus have produced geysers like Io and other moons do, such as those that feed the rings in Saturn's disk, and could the geyser have produced the plasma column (as well as the later ring of smoke around Saturn, called the Ouroboros)?
These are all possibilities, if you accept the premise. And if the planets were in line, the comas would overlap. But these wouldn't be interplanetary discharges, as some have suggested.
Lloyd wrote: Could not Saturn have had volcanic-like eruptions along with the flares that would have rained detritus on Earth and formed a circumstellar disk around Saturn?
I don't think that flares or volcanoes would expel the amount of material you're talking about. How about a major impact event that liberated a bunch of material?
Lloyd wrote: Could Saturn have been a runaway or hypervelocity star? [...] Such a star running into a stellar plasmasphere should be more strongly affected than a normal star would. Right?
What happened to all of that momentum?
Lloyd wrote: Is this subject interesting enough to seem worth spending some time to figure out what parts of the Saturn Theory need to be tweaked?
That depends on how physically constrained you want it to be. I do all of my theorizing in what I believe to be a fully physical framework. I rarely get it right on the first try, but as new information keeps flowing in, I keep asking whether or not any of it invalidates the foundational principles that make up the construct under consideration. So if I think that there is a fundamental error, I have a hard time continuing. The biggest problem that I have with the Saturn Theory is that it doesn't acknowledge the inertial forces of the bodies in question. If you want it to be a physical theory, that needs to be resolved.
starbiter wrote: This talk by Bob Johnson at EU 2013 is thought provoking.
Indeed it is. I agree with his elucidation of things that don't fit with the anode model. As concerns his "solar plasmoid" model, this has much in common with my "natural tokamak" model, which I still use to explain the exotic stars (i.e., black holes, pulsars, white dwarfs, etc.), and which at one time was also my model for the Sun. I agree that there are current-free double-layers (CFDL) in the Sun, and that a toroidal plasmoid instantiates CFDLs, where the stable charge separation comes from magnetic pressure. But to accomplish this, the velocities have to be relativistic; otherwise, the B-fields are nowhere near strong enough to overpower the E-fields. And I couldn't figure out how the solar CFDLs were maintained, all of the way out to the limb, when clearly the relativistic velocities are not. (The 2 km/s equatorial velocity is not relativistic.) So I looked elsewhere, and kept asking questions, and eventually my tinkering with density models led me to the realization (on Dieter Preschel's suggestion) that compressive ionization was the charge separation mechanism, and which would indeed instantiate the CFDLs in a stable arrangement. Disruptions in the balance of charges then result in currents, and the CFDLs become (at least partially) CCDLs. Within that framework, a high degree of specificity can be achieved, so that's what I'm doing. But I'd be happy to discuss the details with Bob Johnson. Can anybody PM me with his contact info? I'd love to hear his critique of what I'm doing, since it's obvious that he has a firm grasp of the principles of electromagnetism.
Lloyd
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
Plasmoid Sun Model Charles, looks like Bob Johnson might be getting the EU team headed in a more productive direction. Maybe you can nudge him even farther. Thanks for the link, Michael. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWpPetpI50U His diagram said the evidence suggests: 1. charge-free double layer (CFDL), not anode Sun 2. plasmoid Sun formed by kink in BC (Birkeland current) 3. energy comes from plasmoid, like BL (ball lightning) 4. sunspots are leaks of electrons 5. Alfven circuit transfers momentum between corona and HCS (heliospheric current sheet) 6. coronal torus also stores energy 7. galactic BC drives rotation 8. BC oscillations may cause solar cycle (first the HCS drives the corona inward, which drives the photosphere, then the corona drives the HCS outward) Is #1 the only statement you agree with?
Saturn System Breakup
LK: Could a similar pattern of forces, like those that affected SL9, have kept Saturn, Earth and probably Mars (though not visible at first) lined up axially both before and after penetrating the heliosphere (so that the planets always appeared to be above the north pole)? CC: Then what broke them out of that arrangement? FWIW, I think that it's a subtle force, and certainly if you're talking about planets, their existing momenta will be far stronger. You're talking about such a brief time-span that the forces necessary to alter the trajectories of such large objects would have to be unbelievable.
Nothing broke them out of the linear alignment until Saturn encountered Jupiter or something. I'm saying they were moving in single file both before and after crossing the heliospheric boundary. It was thousands of years later near the orbit of Jupiter that something caused the planetoids in the Saturn system to split up and find separate orbits. Could they have gotten too close to Jupiter (like SL9 did), which caused each of the 4 planets and the Moon and maybe Mercury to shift directions toward their present orbits?
Plasma Column
LK: Could a plasma column have formed between the 4 planets (after they entered the heliosphere) the way comet tails form? - Or could Venus have produced geysers like Io and other moons do, such as those that feed the rings in Saturn's disk, and could the geyser have produced the plasma column (as well as the later ring of smoke around Saturn, called the Ouroboros)? CC: These are all possibilities, if you accept the premise. And if the planets were in line, the comas would overlap. But these wouldn't be interplanetary discharges, as some have suggested.
Right. I'm trying to think of what processes might more likely explain a plasma column between the planets, rather than an electric discharge. It wouldn't really have to be plasma, but the former column does seem to have produced plasma effects, like the stickman seen in petroglyphs.
LK: Could not Saturn have had volcanic-like eruptions along with the flares that would have rained detritus on Earth and formed a circumstellar disk around Saturn? CC: I don't think that flares or volcanoes would expel the amount of material you're talking about. How about a major impact event that liberated a bunch of material?
The plasma column would not have needed much material. It could have been dust or debris that was suspended between the planets, or it could have been comet-like coma material, or geyser material etc. The circumstellar disk could have been dust or ice, similar to the present disk. - (By the way, have you looked into the geysers and plumes on moons like Io and on Mars? EU says those are electric currents or electric something drilling holes and causing eruptions. There is said to be an electric current[?] between Jupiter and Io that touches down on Io in places. I don't know where they see the field on Mars coming from, but they think the black spots on Mars' south polar region are geysers where something like the aurora hits the surface. Do you imagine electron streams could do that?) - A lot of material would only be needed from flares or eruptions if the supercontinent was formed from Saturn detritus. Cardona doesn't seem to have decided if the continents were formed mostly from detritus or mostly from vulcanism etc. There does seem to have been a supercontinent, but how it formed is iffy. Mathis thinks the continents would constantly have merged and split up cyclically, but I favor non-cyclical shock dynamics. - I have no objections to the possibility of impacts either. How do you think the asteroids formed? From nebular collapse, or from impacts, or what? Could a moon of Saturn have collided with a moon of Jupiter to make the asteroids? Since most asteroids and comets seem to have a lot of craters, there must have been a lot of meteors running into them at high speed. LK: Is this subject interesting enough? CC: That depends on how physically constrained you want it to be. Well, of course, I want it to be as physically constrained as you do.
Lloyd
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
Transcript of Bob Johnson's Video Talk This is just most of the last half of the talk at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWpPetpI50U. I skipped over the discussion of evidence against the anode Sun model in order to focus on just the plasmoid model. Hopefully, the cathode Sun modelers will have comments on this. It looks to me like a plasmoid star made like ball lightning would have way too low density to last for thousands of years without a noticeable decrease in size etc.
... The anode Sun model requires a CCDL around it but plasma could generate a CFDL cell boundary without a charged anode. The particle acceleration in the double layer is similar in both cases. But one type of double layer is caused by an externally driven current and the other is not. So perhaps we should look at what sort of plasma the Sun might contain that would promote the formation of a current free double layer.
Recent interest in cold fusion has led to the study of plasmoids. This is an example here I'll show you after I have a small drink. Most cold fusion devices aim to create a high-temperature plasma which is contained by external magnetic fields, such as seen here in the tokamak machine near Oxford. However there's a perfectly good example of naturally occurring self-contained plasmoids in nature and that is ball lightning. Now the recent cold fusion research has looked at ball lightning in attempts to explain what's going on in these lab machines. I found two very good papers by Tsui published in 2001 and 3 respectively who demonstrated that there is a stable force-free arrangement of currents in a plasmoid when there is a right balance of toroidal and poloidal fields. So that means that a stable plasmoid is like a Birkeland current wrapped around into a closed loop. Now this force-free form occurs at all scales.
It's been suggested elsewhere that the electron itself is a toroid and as we heard this morning Wal Thornhill has argued that there's a plasmoid at the heart of the Milky Way and other galaxies. So, if we accept that, it seems possible that a plasmoid may be contained inside the Sun and other stars as well. Now, this idea isn't new. Alfven argued that the Sun was a pair of toroidal rings. And this double ring model explains the loops of prominences on the Sun as escapes from the toroids. Now, perhaps that's why the Paris Observatory recently published the similar image seen on the right, something of an artist's impression, but at least they're adopting the model.
Now, Bostick's experiments in 1956 demonstrated that the rings are formed when the plasma gun discharges into a magnetic field across the field lines as you see on the left. Initially the plasmoids are tubular and aligned along the field lines and then develop into knots and eventually into rings. In contrast shown on the right Charles Bruce was convinced that ball lightning was a result of ejection of plasma from bends in lightning discharge channels, where the stretched magnetic fields allows plasma to escape from the main lightning discharge channel. Observations of naturally occurring ball lightning seem to support this view that is associated with conventional lightning discharges. Birkeland currents can also develop bends due to what is known as the kink instability. So a plasmoid could be formed at the kink instability in a galactic Birkeland current without the need for an artificial plasma gun.
In a star formed as a plasmoid, it will inevitably contain high-temperature electrons similar to the tokamak devices, and so we should expect to see a CFDL form around it to separate the two plasma states[?]. So I'd like to suggest that there may be a plasmoid in the center of the Sun and a CFDL around it. Ionization would then occur in the interaction region with the surrounding plasma. The tufting in the photosphere would be due to ions accelerated away because they got too close to the double layer. And the electrons would be drawn in against the electron temperature gradient. Sunspots in that case would be leaks of high temperature electrons, like in the Birkeland experiments, and the leak of the high temperature electrons would maintain the overall neutrality of the plasmoid. The energy would come from the energy contained in the plasmoid, which is slowly leaking out, by interaction with its environment, which is similar to what we see in ball lightning behavior. And the CFDL would accelerate the solar wind away from the Sun just like the CCDL in the anode Sun model. But the plasmoid CFDL model avoids the problem of the electrons not behaving further out and it also avoids the need for a balancing proton inflow into an anode Sun. That solves a couple of problems.
But if we replace the anode Sun with a plasmoid Sun, where does this leave the Alfven current? Well, I suggest that we leave it exactly where it was, with the one exception that we touched on earlier. The concentration of the current along the polar axis is not obvious in the ULSC's[?] official data. It seems to be more distributed and therefore more like the arrangement shown here from Alfven's 1941 paper. In that paper he argued that the field-aligned currents from the Sun cause orbital rotation of the heliospheric current sheet by the Faraday motor mechanism. It seems as though the Alfven current around the plasmoid which is not energetically producing aps[?] field jets is primarily concerned with rotation and transfer of angular momentum, not with the processes going on in the photosphere itself.
But if that's so, which way is the momentum being transferred? Recent evidence suggests that the corona is not rotating the same way as the photosphere, or IN the same way. It rotates in the same direction, but not in the same manner. This graph from Giardano 2008 shows the measurements of the rotation period plotted against latitude. And the parabolic curve shows the differential rotation of the photosphere for comparison. And the puzzling aspect is that the corona does not show differential rotation. Also the corona has a faster rotation, that is a smaller period, than the photosphere at higher latitudes. So that says to me that the photosphere can't be driving the corona. It seems it's the corona that's linked to the Alfven Faraday motor.
But Alfven's mechanism can work both ways. And so it's possible that the corona can be driven by the heliospheric current sheet, but, if so, where could the heliospheric current sheet motion come from? The recent evidence from the IBEX mission suggests that the heliosphere sits in the center of a galactic Birkeland current. And it seems reasonable to assume that the presence of the heliosphere affects the Birkeland current, which either bulges around it as NASA says as shown on the left, or perhaps pinches down onto it as we might prefer. Now we know that a Birkeland current has a radially varying helicity which allows each particle to follow the magnetic field line at its own location. The balance is maintained automatically because if I (electric current) is not parallel to B (magnetic field) at any location, the cross product will generate a radial force, which moves the plasma back into alignment.
So suppose that the heliosphere causes the Birkeland current to become misaligned at the boundary[?] of the pinch; then some plasma will be shifted radially out of or into the heliosphere. If it's incoming it will still be carrying the spiraling current which is carried mainly by the electrons. So the incoming electrons will have a strong orbital velocity component and an inward radial drift in which the electrons are moving faster than the protons. Once [they're] inside the heliosphere we would see this as the current in the heliospheric current sheet, which according to Alfven spirals in toward the Sun in [?] cycles. The motion of the heliospheric current sheet could then drive the corona by the Alfven mechanism in reverse. During the other cycle, when the Sun's magnetic field is reversed, but the rotation remains the same, the radial component of the current must reverse and flow back out. And it may be during that phase the corona is driving the heliospheric current sheet.
So it seems possible that the solar cycle is due to the galactic current bleeding into the solar system in one cycle and leaking back out again in the next. Don Scott has recently referred to a paper by Decker published in Nature in Sept 2012. Decker reported that contrary to NASA's models Voyager 1 had measured 0 north-south plasma flow near the heliopause. And instead they found a totally unexpected east-west ion flow plus a continual radial drift. So already there seems to be some evidence for the suggested interaction between the heliosphere and the Birkeland current. So to summarize I suggest that the evidence seemd not to support Juergens' anode Sun. ...
CharlesChandler
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
Lloyd wrote: Is #1 the only statement you agree with?
I agree with 1 (current-free double layers, not anode Sun), and 4 (sunspots are leaks of electrons).
Lloyd wrote: It was thousands of years later near the orbit of Jupiter that something caused the planetoids in the Saturn system to split up and find separate orbits. Could they have gotten too close to Jupiter (like SL9 did), which caused each of the 4 planets and the Moon and maybe Mercury to shift directions toward their present orbits?
I guess that's possible. It would be a lot more likely if there had been a long line of them, and just the few that happened to find stable orbits are still here — the others either fell into the Sun or exited the solar system. The chance of all of the objects finding stable orbits is vanishingly small.
Lloyd wrote: Have you looked into the geysers and plumes on moons like Io and on Mars?
I haven't looked at these. My first guess would be that tidal forces are varying the degree of compressive ionization in the interior, and thus driving electric currents that way. But that's without having gathered any info at all.
Lloyd wrote: EU says those are electric currents or electric something drilling holes and causing eruptions. There is said to be an electric current[?] between Jupiter and Io that touches down on Io in places. I don't know where they see the field on Mars coming from, but they think the black spots on Mars' south polar region are geysers where something like the aurora hits the surface. Do you imagine electron streams could do that?
They could, if they were there. But that assertion brings in a whole host of expectations. For example, in rare cases here on Earth we see corona discharges in the atmosphere (i.e., St. Elmo's Fire). In STP air, this occurs if the E-field exceeds 100 kV/m. Such discharges have little effect on the electrodes. Sailors on tall ships used to climb masts and stick their hands out so they could see the corona discharge emanating from their fingertips. (Kids, don't try this at home. ) In order to get any kind of heat at all, and the effects of EDM, it has to be an arc discharge. But we'd see the discharges, since these radiate brightly, at a number of wavelengths.
Lloyd wrote: I favor non-cyclical shock dynamics [for continent building].
Me too.
Lloyd wrote: How do you think the asteroids formed? From nebular collapse, or from impacts, or what? Could a moon of Saturn have collided with a moon of Jupiter to make the asteroids? Since most asteroids and comets seem to have a lot of craters, there must have been a lot of meteors running into them at high speed.
Interesting question. That's another topic I haven't studied. The mainstream thinks that asteroids are made of the original stuff from which everything else in the solar system condensed. But that's an assumption, not a fact. It's easily possible that the asteroids and comets are debris from collisions.
Lloyd
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
Saturn System Capture
LK: It was thousands of years later near the orbit of Jupiter that something caused the planetoids in the Saturn system to split up and find separate orbits. Could they have gotten too close to Jupiter (like SL9 did), which caused each of the 4 planets and the Moon and maybe Mercury to shift directions toward their present orbits? CC: I guess that's possible. It would be a lot more likely if there had been a long line of them, and just the few that happened to find stable orbits are still here — the others either fell into the Sun or exited the solar system. The chance of all of the objects finding stable orbits is vanishingly small.
Ginenthal, Thornhill and maybe others have discussed planet capture before and suggest that EM forces come into play, instead of just gravitational force, and that EM forces help put the brakes on incoming bodies so they don't just slingshot around the Sun or Jupiter etc. Instead, as they approach "periSun" or "periJupiter" they get slowed by EM forces and enter orbit. The slowing would have to be comparable to retrorockets on spacecraft apparently. Have you studied spacecraft orbiting calculations etc? Thornhill had at least one article saying that the planets (in orbit) at one time on more eccentric orbits I think could have had close approaches in which charge was exchanged that transferred mass from the inner planet to the outer one of the two.
Earth-like planets and moons are similarly "born" by electrical expulsion of part of the positively charged cores of dwarf stars and gas giants. That explains the dichotomy between the dense rocky planets and moons and the gaseous giant planets. In the Electric Universe model, gravity itself is simply an electrostatic dipolar force. So planetary orbits are stabilized against gravitational chaos by exchange of electric charge through their plasma tails (Venus is still doing so strongly, judging by its "cometary" magnetotail, and it has the most circular orbit of any planet) and consequent modification of the gravity of each body. Planets will quickly assume orbits that ensure the least electrical interaction. Impacts between large bodies are avoided and capture rendered more probable by exchange of electric charge between them. Capture of our Moon becomes the only option, it cannot have been created from the Earth. Evidence of past planetary instabilities is written large on the surfaces of all solid bodies in the solar system. That evidence is in the form of electric arc cratering.
Do you find any of that possible? Aside from such a charge and mass exchange, I wonder if there could have been a larger atmosphere around Jupiter or something that would have slowed the planets down enough to be captured. Or could a meteor stream do that? There are several meteor streams, but Saturn Theory tends to regard a lot of that stuff, as well as the asteroid belts, as results of capture of the Saturn System, rather than the cause. Any comments?
But your suggestion that a longer line of Saturn fragments/planetoids, most of which were eaten or spit out, also would be plausible anyway. Then there's also the possibility that intelligent advanced beings secured safe capture, but I don't know of real good evidence for that.
CharlesChandler
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
Lloyd wrote: Have you studied spacecraft orbiting calculations etc?
As an interesting aside, a friend's father worked at the Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) here in Maryland, and he said that the guy who did the calcs for the Voyager trajectories made it so that all of the planetary passes occurred on dates such as his wedding anniversary, the birthdays of his children, etc. But if you think about it, you realize why he did this. It's a non-linear problem, impossible to solve until you fix some of the variables. If you know when the satellite is going to pass by each planet, then you can calculate how much slingshot effect it has to pick up from each pass, and then you can figure out the exact angles of approach, etc. But the moral of the story is that these things are non-linear, and all of the factors need to be taken into account, otherwise you have no way of knowing what's going to happen.
Lloyd wrote: Thornhill had at least one article saying that the planets (in orbit) at one time on more eccentric orbits I think could have had close approaches in which charge was exchanged that transferred mass from the inner planet to the outer one of the two.
Frankly, I don't understand what Thornhill is saying.
But I had an idea along these lines that you might find interesting, because there very definitely is a known property of electromagnetism that could guarantee fixed distances between objects. It's the like-likes-like principle. If the Sun and the planets are negatively charged, and if they are surrounded by positively charged atmospheres, there is an attractive force among them. They are repelled by their like charges, but attracted to their oppositely charged atmospheres, and since the shared atmospheres are closer, and due to the fact that the electric force obeys the inverse square law, the net force is attractive. But this is only true up to a point. If the objects get too close together, and have squeezed out too much of the positive charge between them, the net force becomes zero. If they get even closer, the net force is repulsive. So for any given charge density, there will be an equilibrium distance. Further away, the net force is the attraction to the shared atmosphere. Closer together, the net force is the repulsion of the like-charged solid bodies. So this is definitely a stabilizing force.
Now, is that what's going on in our solar system? What are the net charges, and the like-likes-like equilibria for all of the planets? That would be a tough thing to calculate. We'd have to know the exact charges of the Sun and the planets, and of the interplanetary medium, and then do the non-linear calculations to get the net force over the entire 178.7 year combined orbital cycle. The numbers we have are nowhere near the precision that it would take to prove that the planets are at their like-likes-like equilibria. But if you want a real force, in specific terms, that could do the job, I'd go with this. Planets transferring charge and mass to stay in equilibrium assumes the conclusion, and doesn't constitute an explanation.
Lloyd
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
Charles, et al, I hope you may like to comment on Mathis' new papers. One I quoted in the thread on Orbits of Planets and Comets at http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=4&~. It seems to explain how planets etc attain orbits via magnetic forces.
The fundamental point about either an anode sun or a cathode sun receiving its power via electric currents from the rest of the galaxy is that those currents should be detectable because the total power is known (= the radiative output of the Sun ~ 4 x 10^26 W) and the charged particle density at 1AU is known [see eg M. Maksimovic 2005. Radial evolution of the electron distribution functions in the fast solar wind between 0.3 and 1.5 AU. JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 110, A09104, doi:10.1029/2005JA011119, 2005. p6 Fig 4: Total ne ~2.5/cc @ 1AU.]
Therefore if we assume a driving potential (as Juergens) of 10^10 volts, the necessary current follows & we can calculate the electron velocity relative to the solar wind protons (which is the definition of current). I calculated that the necessary average electron velocity in the anode sun model is 350km/s towards the Sun and pointed out that "This almost the speed of the slow Solar Wind away from the Sun." A cathode Sun would require the same electron velocity away from the Sun, again relative to the protons.
If the data don't show the necessary currents then neither the anode model nor a cathode model will work.
I concluded: "I think the Thunderbolts Project either has to find convincing evidence for a drift current towards the Sun, and a better means of maintaining the anode voltage, or perhaps we have to consider abandoning the anode Sun model." The same applies to any cathode model if the model requires the power to come from the galaxy via electric currents.
I think the first step has to be to see whether that data does exist; I went looking for it but only found contrary evidence, some of which I presented briefly in my talk. I'm not saying that more searching might not find the required evidence, I just ran out of time. But it seems to me that we should start with the evidence, then worry about the model. If the currents aren't there then there's no point in developing detailed models which require them.
CharlesChandler
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
bobinski wrote: I concluded: "I think the Thunderbolts Project either has to find convincing evidence for a drift current towards the Sun, and a better means of maintaining the anode voltage, or perhaps we have to consider abandoning the anode Sun model." The same applies to any cathode model if the model requires the power to come from the galaxy via electric currents.
I totally agree. But don't dismiss all cathode models, assuming that they all require galactic currents. My model states that the Sun is locally powered.
CMEs eject an average of 3.43 × 107 kg/s of matter. I can make a respectable case for the ejected matter all coming from a positive double-layer. This means that these are all positive ions being expelled. Assuming that it's mostly hydrogen atoms, we can calculate the net charge loss straight from the mass loss. This works out to 2.93 × 1015 A. Now we have a charge separation, between the Sun and the CME debris. As a consequence, electrons will flow outward, to recombine with the positive ions that were expelled. That current will be... 2.93 × 1015 A. Then, if Alfven was right about the potential being 1.7 GV, we can get the watts as amps × volts, which comes out to 4.99 × 1024 W. This is within an order of magnitude (or two, depending on whose numbers you use), of the total power output from the Sun.
So yes, you can call it a cathode model, because the dominant form of energy release (neglecting the prime mover, which are the CMEs) is the flow of electrons away from the Sun, but no, there isn't any galactic current.
Sparky
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
bob-
-in my talk.-
Is there a transcript or utube vid...?
bobinski
Re: Anode Sun vs Cathode Sun
Sure - see this thread Post by Lloyd » Fri Mar 08, 2013 3:36 pm
which has a link to the youtube video & a transcript of part of my talk.
Most of the images from the link are stars, i believe. I see currents flowing. If the Chandra X-ray observatory was half way to the nearest star and looked back at the solar system it might see something like the the Google images. NASA did find a 100 fold [whatever that is] increase in electrons entering the heliopause then were expected. There might be a connection between 100 fold increase and the Google images.
I'm not prepared/equipped to be involved in this discussion, but i'm thrilled it's taking place. The link started by Hossein has a few good questions for Bob.
If the planets are self-contained plasma cells, they show no electric field beyond their outer atmospheres. With no interplanetary electric field, there isn't going to be a discharge.
D_Archer wrote:It isn't that simple. Typically, there is an outflow of positive charges from an anode (and/or an inflow of negative charges). If you sample the solar wind, you'll find both charges, but that doesn't tell you anything. In a current-carrying wire, the atoms are neutrally charged, and the current is instantiated by the flow of electrons. So you have to determine which way the charges are flowing. In the case of the solar wind, where everything is flowing outward, you have to figure out whether positive or negative charges are flowing faster. In plasma, there isn't an instrument (to my knowledge) that can incontrovertibly determine this. Electron velocities are greater anyway, due to the smaller mass, but they tend to bounce around within the plasma. If all of it is moving in the same direction, and you measured the velocity of impacts of nucleons and electrons, the electron velocity would be greater, even if there wasn't any net current. The easiest way to determine the direction of the current is to simply measure the electric field. But out in space, instruments get surrounded by shielding layers (i.e., they become insulated plasma cells), and the strongest field is entirely within the cell. It gets more complicated still if the reason for the "current" wasn't an electric field, but rather, something like a CME that accelerated positive charges away from the Sun, and the electrons flowed outward to catch up. During the CME, you could think of the Sun as an anode, expelling positive charges. After the CME, the Sun becomes a cathode, expelling negative charges. At some distance from the Sun, the negative charges catch up to the positive charges, and when the electrons slam into the nucleons, the nucleons are accelerated. Now you have both charges moving away from the Sun in a quasi-neutral plasma, but can you call it a current?) In order to get any kind of heat at all, and the effects of EDM, it has to be an arc discharge. But we'd see the discharges, since these radiate brightly, at a number of wavelengths.
Lloyd wrote:Me too.But if you think about it, you realize why he did this. It's a non-linear problem, impossible to solve until you fix some of the variables. If you know when the satellite is going to pass by each planet, then you can calculate how much slingshot effect it has to pick up from each pass, and then you can figure out the exact angles of approach, etc. But the moral of the story is that these things are non-linear, and all of the factors need to be taken into account, otherwise you have no way of knowing what's going to happen.
Lloyd wrote:Frankly, I don't understand what Thornhill is saying.
