Lloyd wrote:What resistance are you talking about there? You said "as the resistance increases with the thickness of the photosphere". Do you mean the electrical resistance, since ohmic heating means electrical resistance heating?
Yes, it's electrical resistance.
Lloyd wrote:Is there more electrical resistance when the photosphere ions/atoms are farther apart?
Not because of the spacing, but because of the cooling. Electrical resistance increases with decreasing temperature. At extremely high temperatures, hydrogen plasma is a near perfect conductor, but at room temperature, it's an insulator.
Lloyd wrote:How would the negative layer under the photosphere get deeper?
I'm saying that the boundaries between positive and negative layers are all isobars. If the pressure relaxes, the same isobar is to be found deeper within the Sun.
Lloyd wrote:Do you mean because the photosphere expands?
And yes, at the same time, the photosphere also expands upward. The force that is holding it down is its electrostatic attraction to the underlying negative layer. If that gets further away, the electric field isn't as strong. This will allow the photosphere to expand.
Lloyd wrote:Is it at all plausible to you that Saturn may have been a brown dwarf...
Yes.
Lloyd wrote:...and flared up like that about 4,500 years ago?
How would humans have survived?
Lloyd wrote:If so, could Saturn have lost a lot of mass in such a flare, so that it shrank into a gas giant planet?
Where did the mass go?
Lloyd wrote:And, by the way, have you studied bipolar jets from brown dwarfs yet? [...] I assume they would not form the way natural tokamak jets form.
No, I haven't gotten to that yet. But I don't know of another way of producing a jet, so I wouldn't rule out the "natural tokamak" model. My current working hypothesis for red giants is that they are the atmospheres around white dwarfs. So the two distinctly different emissions are not coming from a binary system containing a red giant and a white dwarf -- they're coming from two different aspects of the same star. The same could be true of brown dwarfs with jets.
Lloyd wrote:An article, called Jets from a Possible Young Brown Dwarf, at https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2009/su200932.html says: Like most young stars, HH211 emits bipolar jets of material as it evolves; the jets help to reduce the star's spin as it ages and contracts. The jets thereby facilitate further contraction, and probably play a role in the formation of any developing planetary system.
That's astro-babble for "we don't have a physical mechanism for bipolar jets".

Lloyd wrote:They seem to compare brown dwarf bipolar jets to cometary jets etc.
But cometary jets are not bipolar -- they shoot out wherever they feel like. In my model, frictional charging as the comets cruises through the interplanetary medium results in the comet getting surrounded by a positively charged sheath. As the entire comet gets positively charged, electrostatic repulsion can drive jets through cracks in the frozen surface.
Lloyd wrote:It's fun to read the progress you keep making on your model. I guess it's fun for you too.
It's exhilarating when the picture comes into clear focus -- it makes me feel like I'm out there watching things happen first hand.

Lloyd wrote:Eccentricity I just read a little of the paper above and noticed this: The solutions show that an eccentric secondary’s semimajor axis and inclination both evolve monotonically with time. Therefore, the orbital plane always moves towards a pole unless the orbit is circular. The higher the eccentricity, the faster this movement. If the jet at the south pole is stronger than that at the north pole ( ̇M down u down > ̇M up u up), then the inclination always decreases. The greater the asymmetry, the faster the inclination changes. Also, although the eccentricity remains static, the location of the pericentre is a function of time.
First, I thought it may be suggesting that orbital eccentricity can change quickly, but I guess that impression is wrong. It seems to say only that planets' axial tilts can change quickly.
That's interesting -- I'll have to check it out.