Sun's Magnetic Field About to Flip

[CharlesChandler]

Oh really? Here's my initial take on the phys.org article:

Convection in the liquid outer core generates the geomagnetic field? How does that work? And then it says that this geomagnetic field pushes the same liquid outer core in a westward direction. Excuse me, but the stated magnetomotive force (i.e., convection in the liquid outer core) cannot itself be accelerated by the magnetic field that it generates. Analogously, as a motorboat skims across a lake, it generates a wake. This wake can be made to do work. But it isn't going to accelerate the motorboat that created it. That would be a perpetual motion machine, and that's 'posed to be a Bad Thing.

And THEN, the counter-rotation of the core "is simply explained in terms of equal and opposite action"? That's not an explanation -- it's an observation. Layers in a sphere do not counter-rotate because of Newton's 3rd Law. Rather, all other factors being the same, friction will eventually get all of the layers rotating at the same rate (i.e., "solid body rotation"). If this is not the case, an explanation requires the identification of a force more powerful than friction.

I'll go ahead and read the original PNAS article when I get a chance, and supply my comments. Maybe when they dumbed it down for phys.org, they left out the prime movers. But I have a simpler answer. Magnetic fields can only be generated by moving charged particles. For the Earth to generate a field, it has to be charged. For the charge to be sustained for extremely long periods of time, there have to be current-free double-layers (CFDLs), where the net charge is zero, but a charge separation exists between the layers. To my knowledge, electron degeneracy pressure is the only thing capable of sustaining CFDLs for extended periods of time. So gravity creates sufficient pressure to ionize the matter, expelling electrons because there isn't the room for their wave functions in-between the highly compacted matter. These electrons congregate nearer the surface, where less pressure provides the room for them in-between the atoms. So now you have a positive core and a negative double-layer, both rotating in the same direction. Both of them will generate magnetic fields, but most of the net field will get canceled out, because the fields from positive and negative charges are opposite from each other. This means that only if one layer is rotating faster than the other will there be a net field. Since we definitely have a (weak) net field, one layer is definitely rotating faster than the other. And this is what the research confirms. Then, if that relationship switches, the polarity of the field will switch. Since we know that the Earth's field switches, we know that the differential rotation of inner and outer layers changes (i.e., torsional oscillation).

This, of course, does not identify the force(s) necessary to get the layers rotating at different rates. I'll be curious to see what the original paper says. But it definitely isn't Newton's 3rd Law!

[moses]

Since we know that the Earth's field switches, we know that the differential rotation of inner and outer layers changes (i.e., torsional oscillation).
Charles
No, we do not know that the Earth's field switches.
Cheers,
Mo

[CharlesChandler]

No, we do not know that the Earth's field switches.

Then how do you explain the magnetic striping on the oceanic crusts?

[Sparky]

And evidence of locked in magnetic fields"

Singer teamed up with paleomagnetist Kenneth Hoffman, who has been researching field reversals for over 30 years, to analyze ancient lava flows from Tahiti and western Germany in order to study past patterns of the Earth's magnetic field. The magnetism of iron-rich minerals in molten lava orients along the prevailing field, then becomes locked into place as the lava cools and hardens.

[moses]

Then how do you explain the magnetic striping on the oceanic crusts?
Charles
Clearly this is not the forum for me to go into all that is involved in Earth's supposed magnetic reversals, because I have to talk about Birkeland Currents forming the oceans and planetary interactions pulling continents apart somewhat.

It is the 'we know' that I object to, as this is just one conclusion from the evidence. The people that run this forum generally have other conclusions. So I am just saying that it would be nice that you say that 'evidence suggests', or the 'mainstream view is', etc, rather than 'we know'.
Cheers,
Mo

[CharlesChandler]

I'll go ahead and read the original PNAS article [on the Earth's magnetic field] when I get a chance, and supply my comments.

They don't identify a prime mover for the counter-rotation of the Earth's outer core, as opposed to the super-rotation of the inner core. Rather, they just simulate it.

We perturb the poloidal magnetic field structure to reverse its (dominant) contribution to the EM torque in region I by changing the sign of its degree 3 and 4 components (28). Our model shows that an eastward flow (of a magnitude comparable to that of the westward flow of Fig. 4A) was then driven in region I with an associated westward-directed torque on the inner core.

In other words, they supply the magnetomotive force as part of their mathematical model, and then find that their model is in excellent agreement with the observed anomalies.

So for the time being, I'm sticking with my charged double-layer model, where oppositely charged matter generates opposing magnetic fields. The back-pressure between them will create an instability that might result in one layer rotating faster than the other. If so, there will be a net magnetic field from the faster layer, which would explain the Earth's net field. The field reversal would then take only a subtle difference in the relative rotation rates of the layers -- if the other layer rotates faster, the overall field flips.

One thing that I found interesting was that the differential rotation oscillates, and that this corresponds with fluctuations in the intensity of the magnetic field.

Of particular relevance here is a recent study (31) reporting inner core rotation rates from 1961 to 2007 that are quasi-oscillatory with an ∼ 20 y period, superimposed on a small constant positive (eastward) trend.

This makes perfect sense in a charged double-layer model.

[celeste]

Charles, This is interesting http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/20 ... 103156.htm
See that 5.9 year fluctuation in Earth's rotation rate (length of day)? That's ~1/2 of Jupiter's 11.86 year orbit around the sun. Remember too, the evidence suggesting the solar cycle was related to the sun's motion around solar system barycenter? I'll need to get my hands on their raw data for that 5.9 year cycle, to find exactly when these peaks occur, but for now, I think the general idea to keep in mind for Earth's rotation and magnetic field, is not to forget outside influences.
I think your idea on gravity causing the ionization could be right, since Ganymede http://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/pro ... ct=Jupiter is the only moon that seems to have an internally generated field, and it's also the largest. So what do you figure is the gravitational field we need ?

[CharlesChandler]

I totally agree that outside influences need to be taken into account. Of course, the first thing to consider is the effect of the Moon's rotation around the Earth, since it is absolutely the most powerful "outside influence" (at least when it comes to gravity). And indeed, the Earth's surface~ionosphere potential varies with the lunar cycle in a way that is predictable by the charged double-layer model. If pressure causes the core to become positively charged, and for the excess electrons to congregate nearer the surface, then at high tide, the pull of the Moon's gravity should relax the pressure, meaning less charge separation on that side of the Earth, with the measurable effect at the surface being fewer excess electrons (i.e., less net negative charge). And this is precisely what happens.

Earthquakes are also more likely to occur at high tide. This destroys the standard model, which maintains that quakes are partially the release of gravitational potential in a buckled crust -- yet the Moon's gravity at high tide reduces the gravitational potential, meaning that quakes should wait for low tide. But if quakes are the release of electrostatic potential, this makes perfect sense. The buckled crust reduces the pressure on the charged double-layers, enabling charge recombination (i.e., the flow of an electric current). We can measure the changes in E-fields before and during a quake, and the magnetic field generated by the current. And when the Moon accentuates the buckle by giving an extra gravitational tug, the current is more forceful. Then a force feedback loop kicks in, resulting in a runaway release of energy. The more the crust buckles, the more the charge recombination. The more the electric current, the more the ohmic heating. Expansion of the crust due to ohmic heating then increases the buckle, which closes the loop, and ba-boom -- the energy gets released catastrophically.

So what do you figure is the gravitational field we need?

I think that the threshold for pressure-driven charge separation is a lot less than anybody else realizes. In the Earth, the lithosphere is rigid, but the asthenosphere (and everything below) is plastic, and "flows" like a liquid. This is "explained" as the rock being under such enormous pressure that a little bit of elasticity graduates to full-blown plasticity. But the elasticity of rock comes from the properties of its crystal lattice, which shouldn't change under pressure. In the lab, rock under high pressure simply fractures, and additional stresses result in pulverization, not plasticity. So I'm thinking that under really severe pressure, electrons are expelled. The loss of the valence band weakens the lattice, enabling plasticity in a crystal that otherwise wouldn't allow it. So the threshold for charged double-layers is the lithosphere~asthenosphere boundary (> 80 km below the surface).

The implication is that much smaller celestial objects still have charged double-layers, if their gravities generate the same pressure that we get 80 km below the surface. But this doesn't mean that all of them will have magnetic fields. With charged double-layers rotating, one charge generates one magnetic field, and the other charge generates an opposing field. If both layers are rotating at the same rate, those fields just might cancel each other out. So only with differential rotation are we going to see a net magnetic field, and only with oscillations in the differential rotation will we see the polarity of the net field flip. So Ganymede has a magnetic field, but Venus (with twice the radius) does not, when by the standard model it definitely should. I'm thinking that Venus has charged double-layers same as the Earth and Ganymede, but it doesn't have differential rotation, so it doesn't generate a net magnetic field. But the evidence of Venus' electrostatic potentials is obvious. First, there are continuous electrical storms in its atmosphere. Second, if it were not for electrostatics, Venus wouldn't even have an atmosphere. It doesn't have a magnetosphere to shield it from the solar wind, so by the standard model, its atmosphere should have been swept clean off the planet a long time ago, especially considering the fact that it's closer to the Sun, and the solar wind is more forceful. Yet Venus, which is slightly lighter than Earth, has a thicker atmosphere. Only if Venus' surface has a net charge that attracts the atmosphere will it not get whisked away by the solar wind.

Hence the charged double-layer model seems to handle every challenge thrown at it, including the Sun, the Earth, Venus, Ganymede, ...

As concerns the periodicity of the solar barycenter, here some benchmark papers. I'm still studying this, but the coincidence of the degree of curvature in the Sun's movement and the sunspot cycles is pretty unmistakeable. So I'm thinking that while the energy variations in sunspot cycle are a lot greater than the force of the planets, and therefore the planets are not causing the cycle, the planets might nevertheless regulate the cycle, forcing it to fall into a regular 22 year pattern. This makes sense of the fact that the degree of curvature peaks every 22 years, but the sunspots peak every 11 years. So the idea is that the sunspots would have peaked in roughly that period, but with a little tug from the planets every 22 years, every other sunspot cycle gets enhanced, and this is enough to synchronize the two cycles.

Jose, P. D., 1965: Sun's Motion and Sunspots. The Astronomical Journal, 70 (3): 193-200

Landscheidt, T., 1999: Extrema in Sunspot Cycle Linked to Sun's Motion. Solar Physics, 189 (2): 413-424

Wilson, I. R.; Carter, B. D.; Waite, I. A., 2008: Does a Spin–Orbit Coupling Between the Sun and the Jovian Planets Govern the Solar Cycle? Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, 25 (2): 85-93

[CharlesChandler]

While on the subject of Venus, I just bumped into a few other curiosities worth mentioning.

Venus rotates slower than any other planet, with a day that lasts 243 Earth days. "Mysteriously" the rotation is slowing down. (See this.) Atmospheric friction has been cited as a possibility (see this), but Venus' atmosphere actually rotates faster than the solid surface, so if friction was a factor, the planetary rotation would be increasing, not decreasing.

Venus also has the weakest magnetic field of all of the planets, which is another mystery.

Both mysteries are solved by the charged double-layer model, since the opposing magnetic fields of the different layers exert back-pressure on each other, slowing both layers down. Then, the opposing fields cancel each other out, leaving nothing to measure. But if Venus has charged double-layers, the magnetic force is definitely there, and it's definitely exerting back-pressure on the planetary rotation.

Then, the super-rotation of the atmosphere is, itself, another mystery. And it appears to be speeding up. Despite being 93 times thicker than the Earth's atmosphere, if it is highly ionized, it will have an extremely low viscosity. (Pure plasma is an "ideal gas" due to zero friction.) So anything that accelerates it will have a dramatic effect. But what is the accelerator? It isn't the effect of sunlight. But if the core is positive, and the surface is negative, then the atmosphere will be positive. So the whole thing is an electric tripole, and I'm thinking that the turbulent solar wind jostles the magnetic fields, and the time-varying fields accelerate charged particles. Thus Venus' fast winds are effectively an electric current induced by magnetic flux. The acceleration is applied to the atmosphere, and not the planet itself, because the field lines that are getting jostled are on the outside, at the top of the atmosphere, not close to the planet, where the atmosphere is too thick for the solar wind to penetrate.

[celeste]

Charles, Remember that Venus is spinning in the opposite direction compared to other planets, so a spin down, is really an increase in spin in the "normal" direction of planetary spin. I agree that Venus must have a huge amount of charge segregation in it's atmosphere. Such a dense atmosphere of ionized gas must have a huge amount of gravitational segregation of charge, even in the mainstream model. In that article,"On The Global Electrostatic Charge of Stars", they left out one important thing: If we have a rotating plasma, then recombination and ionization is a "pump" for differential rotation of charge. That's with a net neutral ball of plasma. In models with a charged sun,and either charge radiating away, you also end up with differential currents, just from conservation of angular momentum. What I'm getting at is that the only way for Venus to not have a huge magnetic field, is that it's rotation is so slow? Any significant rotation at all, forces differential rotation of charge,and a magnetic field?

[CharlesChandler]

Charles, Remember that Venus is spinning in the opposite direction compared to other planets, so a spin down, is really an increase in spin in the "normal" direction of planetary spin.

I "think" that you're implying that there is a force that spins planets in the "normal" direction. I'm all ears, but you'll have to say what it is. Here's where some people start talking about unipolar motors, but that requires a unidirectional current, in one end and out the other, and I don't see the evidence of that, so I'm unconvinced.

My opinion is that the spin is left over from the original condensation of the planetoids, though I agree with Jeff Wolynski that the planets don't tend to spin in the same direction as the Sun by being off-shoots from the Sun, as the standard model contends. Rather, the planets were their own discrete condensations (and per Jeff, were actually stars in their youths). They got their spin from the same place the Sun did, but not from the Sun itself. I think that the spin is from the accretion occurring within the galactic magnetic field, which created a Lorentz force. If that's the case, then once the accretion is done, the planet already has all of the angular momentum it will ever have.

Ah, but what if the entire solar system is still moving with respect to the galactic magnetic field? If we're moving parallel to it, would that cause planets to spin?

I think that there are a lot of possibilities here...

Any significant rotation at all, forces differential rotation of charge, and a magnetic field?

That's what I'm thinking.

[celeste]

Charles, As far as our motion in the background magnetic field, it's not parallel, but enough of a component in that direction to matter
http://media.nowpublic.net/images//bb/7 ... 361363.jpg
That's the solar system direction of motion depicted as the red arrow. And we are moving through the galaxy at ~250km/s How can our spin NOT be affected , either in the an EU model where planets have a net charge, or even in a net neutral planetary model with currents as you describe?
By the way, it's not just spin, but precession that is influenced by this motion. Now you know my opinion ( the mainstream model of Earth's precession is totally and absolutely wrong, and our whole solar system is spiraling and precessing around the background field). But I'll be conservative for a minute. If the Earth was really precessing due to gravitational tugs from the sun and Earth, can it do so in your model, without having at least a signature on that motion from the magnetic forces involved?

[CharlesChandler]

Now that's Really Interesting! To be honest, I hadn't given precession much thought, aside from knowing the definition, and not understanding how, in the standard model, gravitational forces on the ecliptic plane caused precession orthogonal to that plane. And my notion of stellar/planetary rotation was just that the accretion occurred in the presence of an external magnetic field, which induced rotation due to the Lorentz force. Once condensed, I thought that the bodies had all of the angular momentum they would ever have (as I said in a previous post). But this is making me think... what if the condensed objects are still moving relative to the field...

In my model, stars/planets are net neutral. But this doesn't mean that there will be no net spin due to the Lorentz force. If the interior of a planet is positive, and the exterior is negative, you get equal-but-opposite Lorentz forces acting on the opposite charges. But the torque will be very different -- the Lorentz force acting on the exterior will do a lot more work than the opposing Lorentz force acting on the interior. So the object will spin in the direction dictated by the exterior charge. And if the object's translational motion isn't perfectly parallel to the magnetic field, the spin will precess.

I'll see if I can find something that specifies the polarity of the galactic field, to see if this checks out. It wouldn't prove much if it did, but it would disprove it if it didn't check out. So it's worth trying just to see.

[Maol]

Charles, you’re a living example of precession. Your head is spinning, you’re perturbed, and before you know it you’ve flipped 180°.

Bingo indeed.

[celeste]

Yes, understanding precession is the key. This brings us to what, in my mind, was the worst mistake made in the history of astronomy. When we first discovered that planets orbited the sun, someone chose to draw the solar system in the horizontal plane. That innate sense we have of gravity acting "downward" fooled even Newton into thinking that Earth precessed like a spinning top. Since then it's been nothing but patches. When they realized that gravity acting in the ecliptic plane could not possibly cause a sphere to precess that way, they came up with the idea of gravity acting on an oblate Earth. Then there was Newcomb's formula to account for the increasing rate of precession, with no mechanism ever given,just a mathematical formula that seemed to work. Only they had to patch that patch too in recent times, again, without a mechanism.
If I could go back in time to when Newton first discovered that gravity acted towards centers of mass, and not "downward", I would have drawn for him a picture of our solar system as a clock on the wall, with planets orbiting in a vertical plane. He would have seen instantly what the problem was. I would bet precession would have remained an unsolved problem, until electricity and magnetism were understood. We probably would have had an EU universe years ago.
Once you realize that precession is due to E-M, not gravity, lots of problems disappear. Precession is around the magnetic field direction, not around a line normal to the ecliptic plane. Saying that changing "obliquity angle" is caused by changes in Earth's tilt, is what you get when you use the wrong reference plane for precession. Etc.


Now here is a question for you Charles. If Earth precesses around the magnetic field, but we measure a varying angle between Earth's spin axis and the ecliptic, that means Earth's orbital plane must precess too (only by a very small amount). Are you sure there is NO net charge on the Earth? Again, taking a very conservative approach,and saying that planets were formed with no net charge whatsoever, would'nt we still end up with some charge, just because planets orbit in a plasma in the sun's gravitational field. I'll agree that plasma is sorted by gravity the most strongly at the sun's surface, but don't we have ANY sorting across solar system dimensions?