Does this picture make sense to anyone?

[earls]

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/ima ... art_lg.jpg

[bboyer]

Not without a context. Nice airbrush work, tho'.

[earls]

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/new ... ybrid.html

[redeye]

Was there any info provided with the image. It looks like the latest attempt to explain the intense magnetism displayed in a magnetar (going by the http address). They're probably blaming it on God, or magic or something. The image kind of looks like an atom...or an orange.

It's probably not the site to get useful information from. For example

This artist's rendering depicts NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft as it studies the outer limits of the heliosphere--a magnetic 'bubble' around the solar system that is created by the solar wind.

See what I mean.

Cheers!

[redeye]

magnetar

Little is known about the physical structure of a magnetar, because none are close to Earth. Magnetars are somewhere around 20 kilometres in diameter. Despite this, they are substantially more massive than our Sun. Magnetars are so compressed that a thimbleful of its material is estimated to weigh over 100 million tons.[1] Most magnetars recorded rotate very rapidly, at least several times per second.[3] The active life of a magnetar is short. Their strong magnetic fields decay after about 10,000 years, after which point activity and strong X-ray emission cease. Given the number of magnetars observable today, one estimate puts the number of "dead" magnetars in the Milky Way at 30 million or more.[4]

Quakes triggered on the surface of the magnetar cause great volatility in the star and the magnetic field which encompasses it, often leading to extremely powerful gamma ray flare emissions which have been recorded on Earth in 1979, 1998 and 2004.[5]

tpod

and

Cheers!

[substance]

So how do they tell a "magnetar" from a normal star?
The induction lines around the orange on the picture look absolutely random to me.

[redeye]

The induction lines around the orange on the picture look absolutely random to me.

Scientific gasblowing?

Cheers!

[MGmirkin]

I see someone's been taking notes...

[Z-axis]

This is what I see.

Plasma is scalable. We all agree on that.

The jpeg shows an artists rendition of a moment in time of several plasma discharges coming from a highly magnetized and charged sphere. One can clearly see the twisting Birkeland currents that are making up the filaments.
The nature of the sphere itself is dictated by which level of plasma activity we are observing.

This same action we see in the picture is exactly the same action happening wtihin a toy "Plasma Sphere" and as we suspect, Galactic Plasma Spheres. http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap080804.html
Save this pic and zoom in to the central star. The resemblance is spot on.

Regards
Z-axis