Electricity and Plasma, from Micro to Macro and Beyond...

[kiwi]

Read now .. before the stench of smoldering-heretic drives you from the Lab

NASA Mission Discovers Particle Accelerator in Heart of Van Allen Radiation Belts
WASHINGTON -- Using data from a NASA satellite, scientists have discovered a massive particle accelerator in the heart of one of the harshest regions of near-Earth space, a region of super-energetic, charged particles surrounding the globe and known as the Van Allen radiation belts......

http://www.nasa.gov/press/2013/july/nas ... fOU-I2LCtp

[seasmith]

kiwi,

Here's the long Supplemental Info that comes with the Sciencemag.org article, (which is payfor) by the authors of that van Allan Belts "accelerator" conclusion. I read it yesterday and and their premise is basically this:

Wave-Particle Acceleration Processes
In order to accelerate relativistic electrons locally, in the heart of the radiation
belts, the acceleration process must break the first adiabatic invariant. Field-line curvature scattering breaks the first invariant but does not provide additional energy. Wave-particle interactions are the only process known to operate in the magnetosphere that are capable of energizing electrons by MeVs. Since wave-particle interactions must operate on gyro-period time scales this puts the waves in the VLF frequency range (i.e. ≳ 1 kHz). Therefore we can conclude that the local acceleration observed in the heart of the radiation belts on October 8-9, 2012 was caused by resonant interaction with VLF waves...

but they admit the study is full of "uncertainties".

http://www.sciencemag.org/content/suppl ... ves.SM.pdf

[GaryN]

So how do the new findings compare with older models?

Title: Energetic Particles in the Inner Van Allen Belt
Authors: Hess, W. N.
Journal: Space Science Reviews, Volume 1, Issue 2, pp.278-312

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1962SSRv....1..278H

[seasmith]

...
information about particle fluxes and spectra presented.

http://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi- ... lassic=YES

pretty well summed it up, and still trying to source the driving "waves".




there no lines but the lines traced by particle
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

[kiwi]

Thanks Seasmith and Gary

[GaryN]

pretty well summed it up, and still trying to source the driving "waves".

Looking through the toolbox, I 'm going to pick out the magneto-pulsed (by Alfven wave) wakefield acceleration process within a torus. The root driving mechanism may require inclusion of Teslas/Bearden/Dollard scalar stuff, and a better understanding of the EM nature of the Sun.

[rkm]

Could this simply be the way a current flows in the Van Allen Belt region?

[justcurious]

The way it works with the van allen belt is that... charged particles flying into a magnetic field will experience a deviation in their trajectory. Depending on the electric field and initial direction of motion, the particles can end up doing a lot of circles before getting out (hence they are "trapped"). These circles are also produced in labs (cyclotron, synchotron and other "trons"). They seem to be finding new things and asking new questions about the van allen belts, but nothing groundbreaking from what I can tell. I believe Kristian Birkeland first proposed such a belt around the earth (before the space age!), but van allen discovered it.

[Doncville]

WOW! that's a lot of info on this thread....Its probably covered here but I'll bring it up anyway.
I fish a lot...I like calm clear no wind or cloud days. Every once in a while on days like this when there is no wind and the water is smooth like glass, I will notice small vortices. That can carry themselves across the water...in scale, they are probably violent but once they reach land, they hardly move a blade of grass....sometimes they do if they are bigger. They are very fast as well, sometimes looking like a fish swimming on the water leaving a wake...but never a fish. My guess is..these are smaller versions of dust devils. Can anyone confirm this as a mini energy transfer?

[rkm]

The fact that the vortices are more energetic over water is evidence of electric discharge, as water is a better conductor than land.

[Doncville]

I've noticed these for years but never quite understood what I was seeing until my recent interest in EU theory.
Wonder if anyone has ever studied them?

[MattEU]

Sort of related and hope this helps but when you have mist over the water you can get mist devils or stream devils

http://fox41blogs.typepad.com/wdrb_weat ... omena.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_devil
http://earthsky.org/todays-image/steam- ... ke-wyoming



One person noticed that the mist devils are stronger near the shore and he spotted them mostly in the still mornings.

I think i read that they seemed to like being near a shoreline and around the shadow/light terminator. Perhaps there is the most potential energy difference or charge to be found in that area and time of day?

[rkm]

In the Mars & comet videos they talk about how discharge prefers steep surfaces and edges.

[justcurious]

Charge likes to distribute along surfaces of conductors. A flat surface will have so much charge per unit volume as seen from far. But of there are bumps or holes, then that surface is contracted into a smaller area as seen from far, hence a seemingly concentrated area of charge. It is mathematically related via Maxwel-Heaviside equations, to the curvature of the surface. This explains why sharp edges for example are more likely targets for discharge. But this is not the only factor, one should also take into account the type of materials involved (ie sea water, type of soils etc), conductivity and other electrical characteristics to get a complete picture.

[CharlesChandler]

The fact that the vortices are more energetic over water is evidence of electric discharge, as water is a better conductor than land.

Discharge is only half of the story. The other half is just electrostatics. If the air is charged, it will cling to an induced opposite charge in a conductor, such as a body of water. The electric force can then prevent the air from rising as it is heated, thereby building up more thermal potential than would have been possible otherwise. The heat comes from a surface (water or land) that is hotter than the air. So the air is being heated. But to get the concentration of buoyancy in these vortexes, something has to prevent the air from rising as it normally would. This is why fluid dynamic simulators won't reproduce these things -- you can get Rayleigh-Benard cells in a simulator, but you can't get the air to cling to the surface long enough to get heated enough to get dust devils or steam devils, much less tornadoes. This is because the simulators aren't taking the electric force into account. In steam devils, there is also a drift that defies a thermodynamic explanation. If it was just buoyancy, the vortex would just sit right in the middle of the pool of warm air, until it was all gone. But these vortexes consistency slide across the surface, disregarding the ambient wind direction (or absence thereof). Obviously you're not going to get that in a simulator, or in any experimental apparatus. Only if the air is charged will there be a Lorentz force that will cause the vortex to drift. So the energy source is thermal potential, from the surface being warmer than the atmosphere, while the electric force holds the air down until it has enough thermal potential to rise vigorously.