Most Thorough Model

[Lloyd]

Capture

CC said: In a non-lossy environment, capture doesn't happen.

Could the Sun have had a disk of dust around it that would have captured a string of planets? Or could the string of planets have been captured after encountering Jupiter?

Z-Pinch
Do you know of any formula that tells how much pressure a z-pinch could put on a body? In the EU Essential Guide at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2011/1 ... -chapter-6 is an image at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/wp-con ... 96x368.jpg which says:
Left: The field generated by a fast 2 kj discharge through 3-turn heavy wire crushed this can. Right: Nature’s lightning z-pinch deformed this metal rod. Images credit: Wiki Creative Commons

On the left is an aluminum can pinched around the "waist" by the 2 kj z-pinch and on the right a piece of copper tubing, I think, used as a lightning rod, which is shown pinched by the lightning apparently. Can you explain to EU supporters why that evidence fails? It's not easy for me to see how smashing hollow metal with a z-pinch would prove that a z-pinch in space would concentrate scattered dust into a ball of plasma.

[CharlesChandler]

Could the Sun have had a disk of dust around it that would have captured a string of planets? Or could the string of planets have been captured after encountering Jupiter?

For capture to have occurred, the foreign objects had to have encountered friction. Yes, a dense atmosphere around the Sun could have done that, but if you're still talking about something that happened during human memory, now you have to figure out what happened to all of that dust.

Do you know of any formula that tells how much pressure a z-pinch could put on a body?

First we have to understand the principles...

On the left is an aluminum can pinched around the "waist" by the 2 kj z-pinch and on the right a piece of copper tubing, I think, used as a lightning rod, which is shown pinched by the lightning apparently. Can you explain to EU supporters why that evidence fails? It's not easy for me to see how smashing hollow metal with a z-pinch would prove that a z-pinch in space would concentrate scattered dust into a ball of plasma.

Those two examples are totally different. The aluminum can experiment uses wire wrapped around the waist of the can, which induces an opposite current in the can, and which therefore generates an opposing magnetic field. Thus the can is crushed by the same force that drives electric motors -- magnetic pressure between opposing currents, and it isn't an example of the z-pinch. The hollow lightning rod IS an example of a z-pinch. The current flowed through the pipe, and the surrounding magnetic field tried to consolidate the current into a narrower charge stream. Ah but there wasn't a conductor running through the void inside the pipe, so the only way that the current could be consolidated was to narrow the radius of the pipe. This was easy to do since the pipe was heated, and didn't have its normal strength.

So what's the significance of this?

Nobody is questioned that electric currents produce magnetic fields. Large currents produce large fields. 10,000 amps flowing through a pipe is a lot of current, and the magnetic field was very strong -- strong enough to cause the collapse of molten steel. So what? The question is whether or not a z-pinch can produce condensed matter. That's a question not addressed by high-voltage, short-duration discharges. When I have "tried" to get people to consider the issues pertaining to z-pinches condensing matter, I didn't succeed. But just to mention one of the issues that precludes condensation, a z-pinch in plasma will consolidate matter selectively, wherein the more highly ionized matter encounters more of a pinch, since it is generating a stronger magnetic field. But you're not going to form condensed matter out of highly ionized matter -- the electrostatic repulsion precludes it. You can get tighter-packed plasma, but you can't get condensed matter. I don't see a way around that.

[Lloyd]

More on Saturn System Capture
Charles, you said thick dust in the solar system could have enabled capture of the Saturn system. Gary Gilligan says the ancient Egyptians and maybe others portrayed the Sun and the planets as red and he figured the color was due to a lot of dust in the inner solar system at that time. He said the dust seems to have settled out by about 2,000 years ago. If the planets initially had more elliptical orbits, they would have swept up the dust more quickly than with circular orbits, I presume. If there were more comets at that time, I think they would have swept up dust too. Do you agree?

Source of Dust
When a star is formed, do you think it would likely have a lot of dust around it, as well as atmosphere? If so, what would they likely consist of mostly? It seems it's mostly hydrogen along with some helium, carbon and oxygen. This paper, http://ned.ipac.caltech.edu/level5/Sept ... holz2.html, says CO, carbon monoxide, is a rather abundant molecule in GMCs. So I suppose CO, H2 and He would likely be thick around a newly formed star. Right? Would anything else likely be common there?

Stellar Radiation
Charles, would a star have to have one or more planets or companions in order to radiate energy and be visible? You say tidal forces produce waves on the inner solar boundary layer that allows charge recombination and radiation, I think. So the Sun would have had one or more planets, if it were visible. Wouldn't it? Cardona says the Sun became visible when the Saturn system entered the heliosphere. He also says Saturn was very dim before that too. I'm wondering if tidal forces began to affect both the Sun and Saturn at that point. Does that seem plausible? Or would the tidal forces on both have at least increased there? I guess the heliopause is about 120 AUs from the Sun. Any idea how quickly (electric) tidal forces would be transmitted between them?

Solar Planets
If the Saturn system came from outside the solar system in a string, i.e. collapsed filament, is it likely that all of the planets came with it, since they're all pretty close to a common plane? Or might it be more likely that one or more were already circling the Sun, which would have allowed the Sun to radiate and be visible and that the Saturn string happened to enter into the same plane? And if there were one or more planets orbiting the Sun, would it have helped or hindered capture of the Saturn string? Do you have ideas how the Uranus system got its tilt, how Triton got its retrograde orbit, how Jupiter got its Great Red Spot and how Neptune got its Dark Spot?

Solar Wind
I suppose there'd be no solar wind without tidal forces on the Sun. Right? If all or many planets, esp. gas giants, were initially on more elliptical orbits, would the solar wind have been greater, do you think? If the solar wind were greater, would it help capture? And would the solar wind help much to clear dust out of the solar system?

[CharlesChandler]

More on Saturn System Capture
Charles, you said thick dust in the solar system could have enabled capture of the Saturn system. Gary Gilligan says the ancient Egyptians and maybe others portrayed the Sun and the planets as red and he figured the color was due to a lot of dust in the inner solar system at that time. He said the dust seems to have settled out by about 2,000 years ago. If the planets initially had more elliptical orbits, they would have swept up the dust more quickly than with circular orbits, I presume. If there were more comets at that time, I think they would have swept up dust too. Do you agree?

It would have taken a LOT of dust to slow down planets. Remember that ionized gases have a very low viscosity, and plasma is frictionless. So to get the amount of friction that would be needed to slow down planets, making them candidates for capture, the interplanetary medium would have needed to be very thick, like the Earth's atmosphere.

Source of Dust
When a star is formed, do you think it would likely have a lot of dust around it, as well as atmosphere?

No, I think that most of the matter gets compacted into the star. The mass of the interplanetary medium is almost nothing compared to the mass of the Sun and the planets. The gravitational collapse model has a thick accretion disc, but the electrostatic implosion model has everything reaching the centroid at pretty much the same time, and clanking together into one or more stars, leaving little left for atmospheres.

Stellar Radiation
Charles, would a star have to have one or more planets or companions in order to radiate energy and be visible? You say tidal forces produce waves on the inner solar boundary layer that allows charge recombination and radiation, I think. So the Sun would have had one or more planets, if it were visible. Wouldn't it? Cardona says the Sun became visible when the Saturn system entered the heliosphere. He also says Saturn was very dim before that too. I'm wondering if tidal forces began to affect both the Sun and Saturn at that point. Does that seem plausible? Or would the tidal forces on both have at least increased there? I guess the heliopause is about 120 AUs from the Sun. Any idea how quickly (electric) tidal forces would be transmitted between them?

Interesting question. Yes, tidal forces drive electric currents, inside the Earth, and inside the Sun as well. Sunspots are more numerous and more active when the planets exert their greatest forces on the Sun. But I don't think that this is the prime mover inside the Sun. There appear to be s-waves at a depth of 125 Mm inside the Sun, which are not related to tidal forces, and which are responsible for the heat that motivates supergranules. The surface effects are more complex, but the bottom line is that I don't think that tidal forces "ignited" the Sun.

Solar Planets
If the Saturn system came from outside the solar system in a string, i.e. collapsed filament, is it likely that all of the planets came with it, since they're all pretty close to a common plane? Or might it be more likely that one or more were already circling the Sun, which would have allowed the Sun to radiate and be visible and that the Saturn string happened to enter into the same plane? And if there were one or more planets orbiting the Sun, would it have helped or hindered capture of the Saturn string? Do you have ideas how the Uranus system got its tilt, how Triton got its retrograde orbit, how Jupiter got its Great Red Spot and how Neptune got its Dark Spot?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions.

[Lloyd]

Charles, I hope to continue with the above discussion, if we both get time for it soon, but I want to bring up a related issue now.

Galactic Density Waves = Spiral Arms
- It's been a while since I read your paper/s on galaxies, but I don't recall you having discussed this. But it seems potentially helpful. It looks like O and B stars can only exist in higher density areas of a galaxy, i.e. in spiral arms. When they leave those areas, they explode as supernovae. If you accept that data, do you have an idea why they would do that? And, if they do explode, what form would they likely take after the explosion?
- It says the density wave is where gas clouds condense into stars, but I don't know if it means O and B stars, or all types, or what. Do you think density wave theory is compatible with your star formation theory involving either UV radiation or colliding gas clouds? How would the filaments form? And how would the filaments form into stars/planets? P.S., I just read somewhere that the density wave is only 5% denser than the rest of the galactic disk.

The Milky Way: Galactic Structure: The Interstellar Medium: Spiral Arms:
http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/bmendez/ay1 ... lec16.html
- Density Waves. We now think that the spiral arms are not physical at all but are rather a pattern of overdensity rotating around the Galaxy. Such a pattern of overdensity is called a Density wave. []

I think it's like a sound wave, such as this:
http://resource.isvr.soton.ac.uk/spcg/t ... gipatm.gif
You can think of the red dots in the animation as special stars moving into and out of galactic spiral arms.

- The spiral arms are regions where stars' and gas clouds' orbits bunch up closer to one another and the region becomes overdense. Stars go in and move out of the pattern, but the pattern persists and moves at its own rate.
- Since the region is overdense when gas clouds enter it, they are compressed and begin to collapse gravitationally [Make that electrically.]. This causes star formation to occur. New stars are born in the Spiral Arms. The new star clusters contain very luminous O and B stars.
- The O and B stars don't live for very long. The cluster might form at one edge of the spiral arm and then exit the other edge a few million years later. But that's all the longer the O and B stars live. They die before ever leaving the region of their birth. They die in supernova explosions. This is why massive star supernovae are only seen in spiral arms of galaxies.
- The other stars move out into the rest of the disk and over their lifetimes move in and out of other spiral arms [similar to the way air molecules move in and out of sound waves = density waves].
- Image: http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/bmendez/ay1 ... 1821_a.jpg
- Caption:
- Dust lane arises on inner edge of spiral arm where gas clouds crowd together.
- Young blue stars are found on outer edge of spiral arm.
- Ionization nebulae arise where newly forming blue stars are ionizing gas clouds.

[CharlesChandler]

It looks like O and B stars can only exist in higher density areas of a galaxy, i.e. in spiral arms. When they leave those areas, they explode as supernovae. If you accept that data, do you have an idea why they would do that? And, if they do explode, what form would they likely take after the explosion?

"Density waves" are astrobabble for "we can't explain spiral arms, so here's a pseudo-physical way of thinking about it that seems to make the phenomena more accessible". But the reality is that "density waves" as conceived don't obey the principles of wave propagation and dispersion, and therefore shouldn't exist.

In my model, spiral arms are "whipper snappers" (referring to the practice of people forming in a line and holding hands and turning a circle, where the people on the end get accelerated).



This would only be possible if there is a force that gets stronger in filaments. Gravity does not, so it ain't that. That leaves the electric and magnetic forces. I think that it's the electric force. Positive and negative charges tend to fall into a linear form, because the like charges repel each other, while the opposites attract. This means that if they all line up in an alternating sequence of positives and negatives, there will be a lot more tensile strength in the line, because all of the like charges are shielded from each other by intervening opposites. In that sense, it's kinda like square dancing -- as long as there is a chick between you and the next guy, there probably isn't going to be a fight, but take the chick out of the picture, and the thing that happens is beer bottles are flying everywhere. So it's that mutual attraction to a shared opposite that is the organizing principle, which binds atoms together into molecules, farmers into dancing fools, solitary celestial bodies into stellar/planetary systems, and stellar/planetary systems into galactic spiral arms. The reason for the star formation on the leading edge of the spiral arms, producing the O and B stars (the brightest, bluest star types) is because the whipper snappers are plowing through the galactic medium, and the matter is getting compressed on the leading edge, forming stars. The O and B stars don't blow up -- they age into the older, yellower stars on the trailing edge of the spiral arm. Scientists don't really have a concept of stellar evolution, and they think that stars live and die precisely at the same point on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, but it's more reasonable to think that as the stars continue to radiate heat, they cool down, and thus they slide down the star types, starting at O, and slowly transitioning through B, A, F, G, ... This doesn't make sense in the mainstream model, in which the matter is just sitting there, and a "density wave" passes through it, but if the entire spiral arm is swinging around through the plasma, it makes a lot of sense. It also makes sense that the outer reaches of the arm are moving 5 times faster than they have a right. Their centrifugal force should cause them to fly off into intergalactic space. But if there is a tensile force there, which cannot be explained by gravity, but which can be explained by the electric force, it makes nothing but sense.

[Lloyd]

More Saturn String Capture Ideas

Okay, so stars don't go in and out of spiral arms? One site said the spiral arms are only 5% denser than the disk between the arms. Does your galaxies paper explain that? Do you agree that the arms capture gas clouds and compress them to help start star formation in the clouds?

I'm trying to understand if the Sun may have been in the spiral arm to begin with and if the Saturn string of planets may have formed from gas clouds that got swept up by the spiral arm and then entered the solar system. If so, I guess that would mean the Sun formed from an earlier gas cloud implosion.

Do you say the Sun would have radiated just about as much energy even if it had no planets, because of the S-waves at the 125 Mm depth? What causes those waves? Resonance? And the solar wind would have been almost as strong without planets too? If the present solar system planets formed with the Sun, should the Sun not have greater angular momentum?

For the theoretical Saturn string of planets to lose enough momentum after entering the solar system to get captured, they had to lose momentum somehow. What are the possible things they could have encountered in order to reduce their momentum?
1. a thick gas or dust cloud or solar atmosphere?
2. a strong solar wind?
3. one or more planets/planetoids or their atmospheres?
4. the Kuiper Belt or dust clouds there?
Can you rule any of those out as extremely improbable or impossible?

Do you know of any way to determine the likely depths of Jupiter's and Saturn's atmospheres? Some exoplanets are said to be as much as ten times as massive as Jupiter. Wikipedia says one solar mass is 1,048 Jupiter masses. So a ten x Jupiter-mass object would be about one percent of a solar mass. That's quite a bit of mass. If a big planet can have a huge atmosphere, couldn't a star have a much bigger one? Or would stellar wind prevent that? Wouldn't a brown dwarf star have a large atmosphere?

When stars form, it looks like the last filaments that reach the new star would be followed by filaments that don't quite reach it, but just go into orbit. Isn't that probable? I'm thinking that there could easily be a large amount of dust from the gas cloud that would make a dense halo around the star for a period of time. Si? And that halo would capture a string of planets.

[CharlesChandler]

One site said the spiral arms are only 5% denser than the disk between the arms. Does your galaxies paper explain that?

This isn't a critical issue in my model -- I'm just saying that "if" stars can get organized into a linear arrangement, there will be more electrostatic tensile force running through the line. The converse is that if the galaxy is rotating, the centrifugal force will stretch the stars into a linear form. Eventually, the spiral arms will vacuum up all of the matter between them as they swing through the plasma, but where in this evolution a particular galaxy might be is not a theoretical issue.

Do you agree that the arms capture gas clouds and compress them to help start star formation in the clouds?

Yes.

I'm trying to understand if the Sun may have been in the spiral arm to begin with and if the Saturn string of planets may have formed from gas clouds that got swept up by the spiral arm and then entered the solar system. If so, I guess that would mean the Sun formed from an earlier gas cloud implosion.

Sorting that out would probably take more information than we have.

Do you say the Sun would have radiated just about as much energy even if it had no planets, because of the S-waves at the 125 Mm depth?

I don't know how to weight the factors. The planets accentuate the solar cycle, which varies 0.1% is total power output. But I don't know how much of that 0.1% comes from the planets.

What causes those waves? Resonance?

I suppose that just about any irregularity could have initiated them. Thereafter, the waves in the equatorial band found an harmonic frequency, being some multiple of the circumference of the Sun. The waves would accelerate, except for the fact that this would introduce destructive interference when the wavelengths got out of the harmonic frequency. So they are self-regulating.

And the solar wind would have been almost as strong without planets too?

I "think" so.

If the present solar system planets formed with the Sun, should the Sun not have greater angular momentum?

Why?

For the theoretical Saturn string of planets to lose enough momentum after entering the solar system to get captured, they had to lose momentum somehow. What are the possible things they could have encountered in order to reduce their momentum?
1. a thick gas or dust cloud or solar atmosphere?
2. a strong solar wind?
3. one or more planets/planetoids or their atmospheres?
4. the Kuiper Belt or dust clouds there?
Can you rule any of those out as extremely improbable or impossible?

Within the relevant time frame, I think that they are all impossible, because I don't think that any of them were thick enough to do the job, at least not recently enough, if ever. Also, if there was any substantial amount of kinetic energy that needed to be thermalized, the incoming objects would have turned into fireballs. It would have taken a long time for the planets to cool down such that life would become possible.

Do you know of any way to determine the likely depths of Jupiter's and Saturn's atmospheres?

I haven't studied them in sufficient detail.

Wouldn't a brown dwarf star have a large atmosphere?

A decaying star might have a big atmosphere. And I guess that any star could. The model that I'm using has all of the imploding dusty plasma reaching the center at pretty much the same time, like the way a stretched rubber band all reaches the center when it is let go. So in star formation, all of the matter is available for compression into the star itself. At least with our solar system, it seems that the Sun got the lion's share of it. It's at least theoretically possible that irregularities in the dusty plasma would have resulted in "late arrivals" that didn't contribute to the star formation itself, in which case the matter would form at atmosphere.

[Lloyd]

Gas Cloud Implosion
Charles, you said a couple days or so ago that you could explain gas cloud implosions (leading to star formation) in more detail, if desired. I desire that. You say supernova effects or gas cloud collisions cause Debye cells in the clouds to line up linearly into filaments. Then what? Do the filaments contract/implode lengthwise? Or do adjacent filaments coalesce? If filaments each have PNPNPNPN charge arrangements, I don't see where there's room for contraction lengthwise, but I can see that adjacent filaments should snap together, like two strings of magnets aligned similarly by poles: NSNSNSNS.

[CharlesChandler]

Gas Cloud Implosion
Charles, you said a couple days or so ago that you could explain gas cloud implosions (leading to star formation) in more detail, if desired. I desire that. You say supernova effects or gas cloud collisions cause Debye cells in the clouds to line up linearly into filaments. Then what? Do the filaments contract/implode lengthwise? Or do adjacent filaments coalesce? If filaments each have PNPNPNPN charge arrangements, I don't see where there's room for contraction lengthwise, but I can see that adjacent filaments should snap together, like two strings of magnets aligned similarly by poles: NSNSNSNS.

The body force causing the collapse follows the electric lines of force. So if you had this...

P - N - P - N - P - N - P - N

...you'd get this...

P-N-P-N-P-N-P-N

...and eventually...

PNPNPNPN

In the case of a jet embedding itself in another gas cloud (such as the Pillars of Creation), the friction will be around the outsides of the jet. So that's where the Debye sheath stripping will occur, and the direction of the stripping will be parallel to the direction of the jet. Thus the general form of the collapse will be that the cylindrical boundary between the jet and the ambient cloud will collapse lengthwise. If it was a soda can standing upright on the road, and you ran over it with a car, that's what you'd get -- the top squashed down to the bottom, along the axis of the cylinder. This might resolve into stars as so many "beads on a string", such as those formed by SN 1987A. So if you had a section of a cylinder, parallel to the axis, you'd have two lines for where the section intersected with the walls of the cylinder...

wall: P - N - P - N - P - N - P - N
axis: - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
wall: P - N - P - N - P - N - P - N

...which would collapse into this...

wall: P-N-P-N-P-N-P-N
axis: - - - - - - - - - - -
wall: P-N-P-N-P-N-P-N

...and then...

wall: PNPNPNPN
axis: - - - - - - -
wall: PNPNPNPN

...and eventually...

wall: star
axis: - -
wall: star

In top view (sighting along the axis of the cylinder), the stars would form a ring.

[Lloyd]

Star Formation
Charles, is your axis empty? Looks to me like there should be a filament there. Are your walls made of filaments? How many filaments around each axis? Six? If each filament forms a star, does that mean the filaments are a million miles apart or so? It seems to me that large filaments that form stars and planets must be made of several levels of subfilaments. If you're going from molecule size to planet and star size, there must be lots of orders of magnitude.

How long and wide would a filament be that forms a planet or star? You said the walls of the filament(?) would form a ring of stars. I guess you mean each filament in the wall forms a star or planet. Do you know of such rings of stars? Can you tell me where to see images of them? You said stars could form like pearls on a string. Can you illustrate that? A string of stars seems different from a ring of stars. I'd like to understand the connection.

Planetoidal Collisions
By planetoid I mean anything below the size of a star, I guess. I think Thornhill's idea is that, because of the charge on different bodies, if one collides with another, the smaller one will receive and electric discharge from the bigger one, which will obliterate the smaller one. He says that's what happened to the meteor at Tunguska. You say planets and stars should have charged comas that attract to a certain distance and below that distance they repel. So would that apply to asteroids and comets too? Would they be repelled from a planet? You have a model for meteor collisions that form thermonuclear explosion craters. Are meteors too neutral or too lowly charged to repel? I assume that bodies on close to head-on collisions might be going too fast for repulsion to prevent collision. I hope my questions here aren't too confusing. I can rewrite them later, if that would help.

The EU model still relies a lot on EDM, or electric discharge machining. Do you explain in any of your papers why that's unlikely to work? If so, which? I don't find it under Miscellaneous. A recent TPOD refers to EDM on asteroids at https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2015/0 ... steroids-2.

[Lloyd]

Solar Wind Destiny
Charles, besides the questions in my previous post above, I have another one. You said a few weeks or more ago that you were trying to find out whether the solar wind leaves the solar system or remains within it or whether it recycles into the Sun. Have you been able to find anything out about that? Do you think one of those options is most likely? If so, which? And what is the implication for finding each option to be true?

[CharlesChandler]

Star Formation
Charles, is your axis empty? Looks to me like there should be a filament there.

If the axis is the center of a gas jet (such as the Pillars of Creation), the entire jet would have the same density, though only the outer surface of the jet, which encounters friction with the surrounding medium, would be the star forming region.

Are your walls made of filaments?

The star forming region on the outer surface of the jet will be comprised of filaments, parallel to the axis of the jet. Imagine a row of needle bearings around a cylindrical housing. Each of those needle bearings can collapse legnthwise into a roller bearing (so to say) at its center. This is where the star will form, if the entire filament collapses.

How many filaments around each axis?

I don't see a reason for a specific number of them -- it would depend on the radius of the jet. I'm currently considering SN 1987A as a possible example of this (answering your later questions about possible examples). I count 27 beads on that ring. I suppose that a wider jet would have more.

It seems to me that large filaments that form stars and planets must be made of several levels of subfilaments. If you're going from molecule size to planet and star size, there must be lots of orders of magnitude.

I agree -- I'm trying to figure out which granularity actually corresponds to the star itself. Does the entire needle bearing collapse into one roller bearing in the middle? Or does the entire filament collapse into a stellar cluster? It will take a lot more research to begin to constrain the model to specific geometries at specific granularities.

Planetoidal Collisions
You say planets and stars should have charged comas that attract to a certain distance and below that distance they repel. So would that apply to asteroids and comets too? Would they be repelled from a planet? You have a model for meteor collisions that form thermonuclear explosion craters. Are meteors too neutral or too lowly charged to repel? I assume that bodies on close to head-on collisions might be going too fast for repulsion to prevent collision.

Yes -- an asteroid on a collision course with a planet, coming in at many kilometers per second, will go ahead and collide, despite the electrostatic repulsion (if any). With enough momentum, that's the determining factor, and if electric charges disagree, the excess charges will be sheared off, and the asteroid will continue toward the impact site.

The EU model still relies a lot on EDM, or electric discharge machining. Do you explain in any of your papers why that's unlikely to work?

I started a folder for the various theories of crater & rille formation (though I didn't do much work on it):

QDL / Topics / Science / Astronomy / Comets, Asteroids, and Meteoroids / Craters & Rilles

Solar Wind Destiny
You said a few weeks or more ago that you were trying to find out whether the solar wind leaves the solar system or remains within it or whether it recycles into the Sun. Have you been able to find anything out about that?

No, I haven't found anything new. The question is whether or not the interstellar wind is creating a heliospheric coma, but I haven't found any studies that went looking for it.

Do you think one of those options is most likely? If so, which?

I'm currently entertaining the notion that all of the solar wind gets recycled. The density of the heliosphere out at the heliopause is so sparse that it almost wouldn't make much difference if there was a coma -- almost all of the mass of the heliosphere is within the first several of solar radii. So with respect to the Sun's mass budget, we really should be looking mainly at what goes on in the corona. There is "some" evidence of matter falling toward the Sun. Whether or not we could rationally say that the mass is the same as that ejected by CMEs is a different story. But I still consider it to be an open topic.

And what is the implication for finding each option to be true?

I guess the biggest difference is in the ultimate fate of the Sun. If it is losing mass, then eventually the electrostatic layers will come unglued, and the Sun will flare up as a red giant when the charged double-layers recombine. If the Sun is not losing mass, it will never come unglued, and it will simply get cooler with time.

[moonkoon]

This Nature article provides more evidence of a (geologically) recent link between both sides of the Pacific Basin.

... Skoglund’s discovery — which is published online on 21 July in Nature2 — was that members of two Amazonian groups, the Suruí and the Karitiana, are more closely related to Papua New Guineans and Aboriginal Australians than other Native Americans are to these Australasian groups. The team confirmed the finding with several statistical methods used to untangle genetic ancestry, as well as additional genomes from Amazonians and Papuans. “We spent a lot of time being sceptical and incredulous about the finding and trying to make it go away, but it just got stronger,” says Reich. ...

[Lloyd]

Cooling Sun
Charles, in your previous post above, you said if the Sun doesn't lose mass it will merely get cooler with time. How would it cool down? What would happen to the outer layers as it cooled down?

Electric Circuits in Space
I did a sample evaluation of the latest TPOD in this thread:
Re: Chris Reeve's et al Ideas to Improve Science Discourse
http://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/forum/phpB ... 34#p108934.

Here is my preliminary evaluation of the latest TPOD, Star Wires.
y=Yes. m=Maybe. p=Probable. u=Unlikely. n=No. q=Author'sQuestion. x=Extraneous, A=VeryImportant
I'm copying here only the statements that I labeled "A" for VeryImportant. Would you like to comment on them and give your evaluation of these statements?

u,A<5) According to a recent press release, astronomers working with data provided by Herschel found evidence for electric circuits in space, although that is not how consensus astronomers label their observations.
p<6) They identified “… an intricate pattern of filaments dotted with a few compact, bright cores: the seeds of future stars.”
u,A<7) Filaments of electric charge can flow in closed circuits through plasma.
u,A<21) Electromagnetism “pinches” those channels, otherwise known as Birkeland currents, into filaments that tend to attract each other in pairs.
u,A<26) There are power-consuming loads in those circuits converting electrical energy into rotational energy. They are known as galaxies.
u,A<29) In an Electric Universe, large-scale plasma discharges form coherent filaments that exhibit electrodynamic behavior.
u,A<32) When plasma moves through a cloud of dust and gas, some of the neutral molecules in the cloud are ionized, initiating electric fields, and thereby creating magnetic fields that tend to align and constrict the charge flow.
m,A<33) Since Birkeland currents are electromagnetic, they isolate regions of opposite charge and prevent them from neutralizing.