© Lloyd

Statements Relevant to Charles' Theory:
- The red dots show the protons and the blue dots show the electrons.
- Strangely the electron temperature branches beyond about 2 AU radius.
- The lower values clustered near the black curve occurred at solar minimum, but the uptick of blue points you can see there occurs at solar maximum.
- As we've just seen from the data, the data appears to indicate that the acceleration [of the solar wind] is coming from this steep potential drop here, as the model suggests.
- And secondly, control of the acceleration is basically the control of the height of this part of the hill here.
- And that could be achieved equally well, either by the adjustment of the voltage of the photosphere here, that is, the amount of charge in these layers, or slightly more subtly, you could keep the charge in the two layers the same, and simply separate them — physically separate them — slightly further.
- So just this part — the double-layer part here alone — can provide the control mechanism.
- Also, sunspots are known to emit electrons.
- Now in relation to this diagram, Birkeland refers to the emission of cathode rays from sunspots, and compares them to what he found when his terella was the cathode, not the anode.
- With slight magnetization on his cathode globe, the rays came from the equatorial regions, which is the sunspot belt, and they formed groups, exactly like sunspots do, as we see here in the picture.
- And these rays — these cathode rays in Birkeland's terella — seem to be analogous to the strahl electron beams we've already seen.
- In his recent interview with Michael Goodspeed, Don Scott pointed out the correlation between sunspots in the photosphere and the bright x-ray emission regions in the chromosphere and corona above.
- The x-ray emission stops at higher latitudes, where there are no sunspots.
- Now x-rays are due to high-speed electrons impacting neutral atoms.
- So it seems that the high-temperature electrons causing the x-rays are coming from the sunspots.
- It's well-known that plasma also forms a double-layer to separate areas of plasma with different properties, such as temperature, or degree of ionization.
- And these types of double-layer are current-free double-layers, in contrast to the current-carrying double-layers formed in a Crookes tube.
- But one type of double-layer is caused by an externally driven current, and the other is not.
- 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.
- The tufting in the photosphere would be due to ions accelerated away because they got too close to the double layer.
- And instead they found a totally unexpected east-west ion flow plus a continual radial drift.
- One last point: Charles Bruce considered that the filamentation around established stars is a low-current remnant of the high-current formative phase which we see clearly in star-forming regions.
- Suppose there is a remnant current flowing past the Sun.

Statements of BJ's Theory:
- Alfvén suggested that the heliospheric current sheet is part of a circuit in the heliosphere.
- The important thing is that Alfvén's current does not enter or leave the photosphere, and the direction of the current changes in alternate solar cycles.
- After leaving the Sun, the fast solar wind curves along the magnetic field lines towards the equator from both poles, eventually linking up to form the heliospheric current sheet.
- The inner and outer photospheres are two layers of positive charge (which you can see as blue regions here) causing the height of this potential hill here, and then the lower corona is a negative layer here, which causes this steep potential drop down here.
- a stable plasmoid is like a Birkeland current wrapped around into a closed loop.
- this force-free form occurs at all scales.
- It's been suggested elsewhere that the electron itself is a toroid ...
- Birkeland currents can also develop bends due to what is known as the kink instability.
- 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[?].
?- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

Statements Relevant to Thornhill's Theory:
- The current EU model modifies that again, and we now assume that the inflowing electron current is balanced by positive discharges from the coronal torus to the photosphere.
- And as Wal Thornhill said this morning, these discharges appear as sunspots in the photosphere.
- In the heliosphere, the inflowing electron current powering the Sun is assumed to drift slowly towards the Sun under the influence of a very low electric field, like the current in a Crookes tube.
- We've seen that the balancing positive charge is apparently delivered from the coronal torus, and creates sunspots as it punches through the photosphere.
-?- And the model that suggests that the sunspots are caused by discharges from the torus is out of step with when the torus is actually there.
-?- The important point is that there is no corresponding strahl population on the left of the diagram, which is the part moving towards the Sun, as you can see from the velocity at the bottom is zero in the middle.
-?- But a problem with this model is that the observed motions of sunspots appears to show that matter is falling in.
-?- For example, Newton in 1958 refers to an always present slight downdraft of hydrogen and calcium gas from the chromosphere above a sunspot, falling in.
- Wal Thornhill has argued that there's a plasmoid at the heart of the Milky Way and other galaxies.