http://www.esa.int/esaSC/SEMOPF9RR1F_index_0.html
I seem to recall that some (more energetic {?}) electric discharges can be rather radio loud... Whereas others can be rather quiet.ESA’s SOHO has helped uncover radio screams that foretell dangerous Coronal Mass Ejections, or CMEs, which produce radiation storms harming infrastructure on ground, in space as well as humans in space.
Scientists made the connection by analysing observations of CMEs from ESA/NASA’s SOHO (Solar and Heliospheric Observatory) and NASA’s Wind spacecraft.
[...]
"Some CMEs produce radiation storms, and some don't, or at least the level of radiation is significantly lower," said Dr. Natchimuthuk Gopalswamy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, lead author of the results. "The trick is to identify the ones that can produce dangerous radiation, so we can warn astronauts and satellite operators."
Gopalswamy and his team may have found a way to do just that. CMEs with powerful shocks capable of causing radiation storms ‘scream’ in radio waves as they slam through the solar wind, according to the team.
[...]
The team compared observations from both SOHO and Wind and looked at 472 CMEs between 1996 and 2005 that were fast and covered a large area of the sky. They discovered that those CMEs which generated a radio signal also produced radiation storms, but CMEs without a radio signal did not.
[...]
"Since the radio signal moves at the speed of light while the particles lag behind, we can use a CME's radio noise to give warning that it is generating a radiation storm that will hit us soon," said Gopalswamy. "This will give astronauts and satellite operators anywhere between a few tens of minutes to a couple of hours to prepare, depending on how fast the particles are moving."
The team also noticed that most radio-loud CMEs came from parts of the Sun in line with Earth (areas near the solar equator), while radio-quiet CMEs mostly came from the edges of the Sun. Since all the CMEs studied were fast and could have produced strong shocks, detecting radio noise and radiation from some but not others might simply be due to geometry.
(Stabilization of a High-Voltage Discharge by a Vortex)
http://ams.allenpress.com/archive/1520- ... -4-468.pdf
Perhaps only one possibility. But the "radio loud"-ness seems important, quite possibly of "electrical" origin. They do seem to talk about the charged particle being "accelerated" (though they say by the "shock front" or something, as opposed to by electric fields or in an electric current)...Among other things, Bernard Vonnegut wrote:We have found that the vortex produces a stabilizing effect similar to that reported in early work on the arc fixation of nitrogen[3] and that it modifies the radio frequency noise that it produces.
[...]
It was also observed that, without the vortex, the discharge produced considerable radio-frequency noise in the broadcast band but that, when the vortex was turned on, this noise disappeared.
Cheers,
~Michael Gmirkin
