Sun Stroke

[Sparky]

Sun Stroke

The Sun behaves according to the laws of electromagnetism and is a positively charged electrode in a circuit that spans the Solar System.

Why are so many negative charged electrons leaving the positive electrode?

[jjohnson]

How many do you think are leaving the Sun?
I posed that just to make us think for a minute as to how paltry our information is about what's leaving, what's coming in, and how and where.

The one instrumented explorer that passed over the polar latitudes of the Sun was Magellan, and it detected polar jets of material not so different (other than direction) from the detections made by the bulk of the solar instruments in orbits that are ALL more or less in or near the ecliptic. That includes SDO, too. The Magellan mission was terminated years ago.

We have way too few observations to have the entire picture in place, even approximately, particularly above and below the ecliptic. We are only seeing a tiny fraction of solar emission phenomena from our narrow vantage point.

A light bulb analogy is sort of a 2D example because the wiring contrains the arriving and deperting electron flow to just the wring itself. Electricity transmission through a space plasma in which the cathode is a point in the midst of a huge volume of highly conductive ionized material is much more complex than a twisted pair of wires and a lightbulb. Nonetheless, just as in the lightbulb, the number of electrons drifting in at one connection equals the number drifting out the other side. Why should the Sun be any different?

Recall that the wires themselves do not conduct the electric power. That implies that highly conductive plasma also does not conduct its electrical power, either. The classic take on that (Poynting, Heaviside, Maxwell) is that the power is conducted in the electromagnetic field that is created by the current flows, not the charge carriers (electrons, protons, even positrons) themselves. More complex than first imagined, eh, what?

With the Sun, there can be current sheets carrying positive charges one way, and others moving the oppositely charged particles the other. Auroras are said to do that. We don't know enough about the Sun, but what we know about circuitry is that electrons in = electrons out. It's not the direction, its the energy transported by the fields they set up by being in motion in a net direction. For each electron that arrives at the Earth, another one has to leave.

Otherwise all our hair would be standing on end all the time, and it's be getting worse as time went by. The Universe sees to that problem somehow, trust me. It likes things to be balanced, even though it takes charge differentials to keep things unbalanced and moving. I think the Universe is a conservative, zero sum game, that for all practical purposes presents zero friction to its activity, and that it presently contains all the energy, momentum and particles that it has ever had and ever will, and while there can be exchange between energy and particle states, nothing really changes from the "outside" perspective.

The Sun can continue to receive and radiate energy with no net change in its charge balance (slightly more positive than negative - a cathode - forever or until something in the local galaxies' circuitry changes the input.

Well, it's one way of viewing it, anyway. No telling if it is an accurate picture or not, yet. Too little observed data.

Jim

[Sparky]

thanks, Jim....trying to sort out the terminologies that EU is applying.

I take anode to mean the positive plate, as in a vacuum tube, but it could mean other things:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electron

An electron in motion relative to an observer generates a magnetic field, and will be deflected by external magnetic fields.

Does this imply that if the observer were moving with the electron, there would be no magnetic field produced?


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strahl_(astronomy)

Strahl, from the German for "ray" or "beam" such as radiation is, is the electron component of the solar wind that is the most closely aligned with the magnetic field of the Sun. These electrons are part of the high speed component of the solar wind and have sufficient velocity to escape from the electrostatic potential of the Sun. They carry the electron heat flux of the solar wind and always move away from the Sun along the magnetic field lines. Strahl are distinguished from the 'core' and 'halo' populations of electrons, which form part of the low and high speed solar winds and are normally anisotropic with respect to the Sun's magnetic field.[1][2]

Electrons precipitating into the polar regions of the Sun form the source of the strahl. When the magnetic lines of force are connected with the interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) in the appropriate direction, the strahl electrons are transported from the solar corona with energies of up to several hundred eV. When the Sun's magnetic field lines are not connected with the IMF, the strahl effect is blocked at that pole.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anode
A widespread misconception is that anode polarity is always positive (+). This is often incorrectly inferred from the correct fact that in all electrochemical devices negatively charged anions move towards the anode (hence their name) and positively charged cations move away from it. In fact anode polarity depends on the device type, and sometimes even in which mode it operates, as per the above electric current direction-based universal definition. Consequently, as can be seen from the following examples, in a device which consumes power the anode is positive, and in a device which provides power the anode is negative:

In a discharging battery or galvanic cell (diagram at right) the anode is the negative terminal since that is where the current flows into the device (see drawing). This inward current is carried externally by electrons moving outwards, negative charge moving one way constituting positive current flowing the other way. It is continued internally by positive ions flowing into the electrolyte from the anode, i.e., away (surprisingly) from the more negative electrode and towards the more positive one (chemical energy is responsible for this "uphill" motion).
In a recharging battery, or an electrolytic cell, the anode is the positive terminal, which receives current from an external generator. The current through a recharging battery is opposite to the direction of current during discharge; In other words, the electrode which was the cathode during battery discharge becomes the anode while the battery is recharging.

In a battery or galvanic cell, the anode is the negative electrode from which electrons flow out towards the external part of the circuit.

In electronic vacuum devices such as a cathode ray tube, the anode is the positively charged electron collector. In a tube, the anode is a charged positive plate that collects the electrons emitted by the cathode through electric attraction. It also accelerates the flow of these electrons.

In a semiconductor diode, the anode is the P-doped layer which initially supplies holes to the junction. In the junction region, the holes supplied by the anode combine with electrons supplied from the N-doped region, creating a depleted zone. As the P-doped layer supplies holes to the depleted region, negative dopant ions are left behind in the P-doped layer ('P' for positive charge-carrier ions). This creates a base negative charge on the anode. When a positive voltage is applied to anode of the diode from the circuit, more holes are able to be transferred to the depleted region, and this causes the diode to become conductive, allowing current to flow through the circuit.

The opposite of an anode is a cathode. When the current through the device is reversed, the electrodes switch functions, so anode becomes cathode, while cathode becomes anode, as long as the reversed current is applied, with the exception of diodes where electrode naming is always based on the forward current direction.

This should clear up my position. So, that taken with your explanation, the sun is some combination of a diode, vacuum tube, battery, and external circuit?!