Atoms, Stars, & Galaxies

[CharlesChandler]

There is an organizing principle in physics that operates across a broad range of scales, from the force that binds atoms together into molecules, to the force that organizes stars into galaxies — it's the electric force.

Richard Feynman was the first to realize that there is a hidden significance to the electric force's inverse square law that is important in bringing atoms together to make molecules.1:ch2:pg2 He said that it requires ionization, because a positive ion is attracted to a neutrally charged atom. The reason is that the negative charges in the electron cloud on the neutral atom get nearer to the distant positive ion. Then if we just look at the effects of the inverse square law, we realize that the near-side electrons exert a greater force per elementary charge on the positive ion than the atomic nucleus, and the force from the far-side electrons isn't that much less. If we add up all of these +/− forces, we find that the neutral atom shows a slight net negative charge at a distance. (See Figure 1.)

17651.png (8.59 KiB) Viewed 10244 times

Figure 1. Electric forces between a neutrally charged helium atom (not to scale) and a positive test charge, showing a net attraction. At the same distances, gravity is just 7.47 × 10−64 N, so it isn't a factor.


This means that any nearby positive ion will be pulled toward the neutral atom, despite the net charge of the whole assembly being positive (ergo the paradoxical "like-likes-like" effect). We should also note that the effect gets stronger as the positive ion gets nearer to the neutral atom, since the relative proximity of the positive ion to the near-side electrons gets more dramatic. It's also possible (depending on which atomic model is used) that the electrons favor that near side, being attracted to the positive ion. If there is even more negative charge on the near side of the neutral atom, the positive ion will experience an even greater attraction. So the positive ion is pulled toward the neutral atom, to the point of sharing electrons with it. At that point, a molecule has been formed.

The corollary is that if both atoms are neutrally charged, they will both be showing a net negative charge at a distance, and they will repel each other. This is why the elements with fully populated outer electron shells (i.e., the noble gases) are the least likely to form molecules — electrostatic repulsion within the shells calls for an equal distribution of electrons, and if the shell is fully populated, there is nowhere for electrons to go if exposed to a negative test charge at a distance, so they stay where they were, and push back. This is also why the elements with the lowest ionization potentials are the best at forming molecules — once one of the atoms gets ionized, the net electric force goes from repulsive to attractive.

A related phenomenon is the molecule-building facilitated by an external electric field, which chases electrons to the far sides of their atoms, making electric dipoles out of the atoms. With the negative side of one atom facing the positive side of the other, there is an electrostatic attraction between the atoms. (See Figure 2.) This can turn a gas into a liquid, a liquid into a liquid crystal,2,3,4,5 or a gas into a polymerized solid.

16729.png (10.46 KiB) Viewed 10244 times

Figure 2. The charges within atoms get polarized in an external electric field.


This same principle also acts on an astronomical scale. In the beginning, nothing existed except huge clouds of weakly ionized gas & dust, known as dusty plasmas. Somehow, these extremely diffuse clouds collapsed into very dense stars, planets, & moons, but Newtonian physics can't explain how this ever could have happened. Gravity will pull the matter inward, but if it succeeds in compressing the gas, the hydrostatic pressure inside the gas will push back out. As the compression continues, the outward force of internal pressure will increase faster than the inward force of gravity, meaning that eventually, the pressure will be as strong as gravity. Once the equilibrium has been achieved, further compression can't happen, because there isn't any net force. For example, the Earth's atmosphere is far cooler than a dusty plasma of the same density, and it is being compressed by the Earth's gravity, which is a lot stronger than the gravity inside a dusty plasma with nothing else around, and yet the atmosphere doesn't collapse under its own weight, because the hydrostatic pressure won't let it.

Such being the case, it's no surprise that modern telescopes have detected primordial plasmas that refuse to collapse, some of which seeming to have been around since the beginning of time. If they were going to collapse under their own weight, they already would have. If they haven't already, it's because gravity alone isn't enough. So the equilibrium between gravity and hydrostatic pressure that we observe here on Earth is the same everywhere else in the Universe — gravity can't over-ride pressure. So what is the source of the additional force necessary to compress a dusty plasma into a star, planet, or moon?

Studying the conditions in which a dusty plasma does collapse reveals the nature of that force. The dusty plasma has to be hit by the ejecta from a supernova, or it has to collide with another dusty plasma. What's the significance? It isn't that the collapse has been facilitated by a stronger gravitational attraction in denser matter, because there will also be an increase in hydrostatic pressure that will more than offset the gravity. Furthermore, the combined velocities in such collisions are typically above 20 km/s, and the thermalization of hypersonic collisions should greatly increase the hydrostatic pressure, causing the expansion (or even the explosion) of the mixture.

So we have to look at non-Newtonian effects of dusty plasma collisions that might generate attractive body forces. And we won't have to look very far. Dusty plasmas are made up of Debye cells, with negatively charged nuclei, and positively charged sheaths. (See Figure 3.) So it's the same electrostatic configuration as atoms surrounded by electron clouds, except the polarity is inverted. Still, the electric force works the same either way, and in the resting condition, net-neutral Debye cells repel each other. At a typical spacing of 10 m (center to center), and with just 1 charged particle in 1015 neutrals, the electrostatic repulsion between the Debye sheaths is stronger than the gravitational attraction.6 This means that hydrostatic pressure isn't the only reason dusty plasmas don't collapse under their own weight — long before they even come into contact with each other and start building up pressure, the electric force offsets gravity, and the compression never even begins. Thus they are noble dusty plasmas, so to say, with "fully populated" Debye sheaths, and all of them are showing a net positive charge at a distance, meaning a net repulsion between them. This is what led Irving Langmuir to label them as "plasmas" as an analogy for blood cells that insulate their contents from their neighbors.7

16749.png (7.37 KiB) Viewed 10244 times

Figure 3. Resting dusty plasma, made up of Debye cells that repel each other.


But look at what happens in Figure 4, where two sets of Debye cells collide — the sheaths get stretched into comas by the friction. And this is the same electrostatic configuration as Figure 2, where polarization of particles resulted in an attractive force that brought everything together. So in this form, the net electric force is attractive, and now it's 3 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity.6 And just like it was with atoms, the closer the cells get to each other, the greater the attraction, because of the inverse square law. Now the dusty plasma is definitely going to implode into a star.

16257.png (19.77 KiB) Viewed 10244 times

Figure 4. Debye sheaths stretched into comas by friction.


Interestingly, supernovae are better triggers of star formation than simple gas cloud collisions. In both cases, large bodies of Debye cells collide, with the effects already described. But what's different about supernovae? In addition to the ejecta, they also generate large batches of UV radiation. This photo-ionizes the matter, enabling atoms to form into molecules, molecules into particles, and particles into Debye cells. All other factors being the same, these would be resting Debye cells, as in Figure 3, which repel each other. And the greater the degree of ionization, the greater the repulsion. But then the ejecta from the supernova arrive, stretching the Debye sheaths into comas, and generating an electrostatic attraction that causes the cells to collapse into a star. So it's the same "like-likes-like" principle at two different scales, and supernovae just happen to provide the catalysts for both processes.

And there is yet another scale at which the same principle operates — that of galaxies. Over 6 billion years ago, most of the galaxies were irregular clumps of stars, such as in Figure 5. Now most galaxies are radially symmetrical, such as in Figure 6.8 Somehow, all of the stars are getting coerced into a regular form. This appears to be the consequence of galactic mergers.9:12/22/23 But that doesn't explain the regularity of the result — the shape of the merger should be even more complex than the components.

15514.jpg (10.65 KiB) Viewed 10244 times

Figure 5. NGC 1427A

15573.png (28.44 KiB) Viewed 10244 times

Figure 6. ESO 325-G004


One possibility is that somehow, the merger forced the implosion of the galaxy. No matter how irregular the assembly, there will always be a centroid, which will be the focal point of any implosion. And the ejecta from the resulting explosion will always be radially symmetrical. With a little bit of angular momentum, the resulting galaxy will be elliptical, while a lot will exaggerate the aspect ratio into a disc. Either way, in just one action, the most peculiar of shapes can be morphed into near-perfect symmetry. But why would the merger of two or more smaller galaxies result in the implosion of the entire assembly? All other factors being the same, we'd expect the components to already be in hydrostatic equilibrium. The combination would then have twice the mass, and thus more gravity, but it will also have twice the hydrostatic pressure, plus the thermalization of the combined velocities. So just like with colliding dusty plasmas, we'd expect the collision of two or more galaxies to blow them apart, not cause them to implode on each other. But therein lies the answer, because just like dusty plasmas, stellar systems are charged bodies surrounded by plasma sheaths. If our Sun were involved in such a collision, our spherical heliosphere would be stretched into a coma by friction with other heliospheres or with interstellar plasmas. Since the heliosphere has a slight positive charge,10,11 and assuming that other stars have a similar set-up, we have the same configuration as in Figure 4, where there will be an electrostatic attraction between stars far stronger than gravity. Now the stellar systems are going to implode on the galactic centroid. The only difference is that they aren't going to get compressed into one galactic star — there are limits to how big a star can get before a Type 1a supernova blows it apart. So the implosion results in a violent explosion, sending all of the matter hurling back out — and in a radially symmetrical form.

In conclusion, the electric force is the organizing principle of the Universe, and interestingly, it seems that the same configuration does the job at several different scales, pulling atoms together into molecules, molecules into particles, particles into Debye cells, Debye cells into stars, and stars into galaxies — all on the basis of a mutual attraction to a shared opposite.


References

1. Feynman, R.; Leighton, R.; Sands, M. (1970): The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Reading, MA, USA: Addison-Wesley

2. Nagornyak, E.; Pollack, G. H. (2005): Connecting filament mechanics in the relaxed sarcomere. Journal of Muscle Research and Cell Motility, 26 (6-8): 303-306

3. Pollack, G. H.; Figueroa, X.; Zhao, Q. (2009): Molecules, Water, and Radiant Energy: New Clues for the Origin of Life. International Journal of Molecular Sciences, 10 (4): 1419

4. Zhao, Q.; Coult, J.; Pollack, G. H. (2010): Long-range attraction in aqueous colloidal suspensions. Proceedings of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation, 7376: 73761C1-73761C13

5. Pollack, G. (2013): The Fourth Phase of Water: Beyond Solid, Liquid, and Vapor. Seattle: Ebner and Sons Publishers

6. Chandler, C. (2016): Accretion. qdl.scs-inc.us, 12692

7. Mott-Smith, H. M. (1971): History of "Plasmas" Nature, 233 (5316): 219

8. Delgado-Serrano, R. et al. (2010): How was the Hubble sequence 6 Gyr ago? Astronomy and Astrophysics, 509 (A78): 1-11

9. Mo, H.; van den Bosch, F.; White, S. (2010): Galaxy Formation and Evolution.

10. May, H. D. (2008): A Pervasive Electric Field in the Heliosphere. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 36 (5): 2876-2879

11. May, H. D. (2010): A Pervasive Electric Field in the Heliosphere (Part II). viXra, Astrophysics: 1005.0090

[sketch1946]

Hi Charles,
Your articles are extremely interesting...
Seems like some real physics is happening...

What's your take on the source and extreme energies of the cosmic 'rays'?
Do you have a model for the sun?
Have you a model for the electric field between galaxies?
Do you have a model for comets?

mmm... that'll do for a start

[sketch1946]

Hi Charles,
What do you think of the theory that magnetism is just part of the electric field?

What is your view of this paper?
"The Unified Theory – Electricity, Magnetism, Gravity and Mechanics"
Julius Pretterebner
https://arxiv.org/html/physics/9908024

[sketch1946]

Hi Charles,
I would love to hear your reactions to this:

Electromagnetism and the problem of 'action at a distance':

"....Maxwell himself even commented on this critically in an article on Attraction written for the 9th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1875.

If, in order to get rid of the idea of action at a distance, we imagine a material medium through which the action is transmitted, all that we have done is to substitute for a single action at a great distance a series of actions at smaller distances between the parts of the medium, so that we cannot even thus get rid of action at a distance.

and elsewhere he said even more pointedly

…it is in questionable scientific taste, after using atoms so freely to get rid of forces acting at sensible distances, to make the whole function of the atoms an action at insensible distances.

Despite these scruples, Maxwell’s theory of electrodynamics, based on forces acting over insensible distances, proved to be tremendously successful. The elaborate and complicated material mechanisms that Maxwell originally conceived to embody the mathematical relations of the field eventually receded in his thinking, as he came to focus more and more on purely abstract energy-based considerations.

We may express the fact that there is attraction between the two bodies by saying that the energy of the system consisting of the two bodies increases when their distance increases. The question, therefore, Why do the two bodies attract each other? may be expressed in a different form. Why does the energy of the system increase when the distance increases?

It’s easy to see that Maxwell’s conception of the electric field is quite consistent with this energy-based approach. First, recall that, according to standard electromagnetic theory, the energy density of an electric field in vacuum is (1/2)e0E2, where E is the magnitude of the electric field at the given point and e0 is the permittivity of the vacuum. (For the spherical field around a stationary mass point, E drops off as the square of the distance, so the energy density drops off as the fourth power, so the total integrated energy is finite.) Now consider two particles with equal and opposite electric charges, and suppose they are initially co-located at a single position. Their electric fields cancel out, because the union of these oppositely charged particles is an electrically neutral particle. As a result, the dielectric medium surrounding these two particles is “un-stressed”, i.e., none of the tiny springs are displaced at all, so no energy is stored in those springs. Now suppose we separate the two oppositely charged particles by some distance. This displacement results in a net electric field in the surrounding medium. Much of the two fields still cancel out, but not all, so the dielectric elements are displaced, the “springs” are stretched slightly, and the medium now holds some energy. The energy came from the work done to separate the particles, so we see that these two oppositely charged particles exert a force of attraction on each other (through the intermediary of the dielectric medium). The further we separate the particles, the more energy we put into the field, and we approach the energy of two complete isolated fields when the particles are infinitely far apart.

The other case to consider is two particles with the same electric charges, both positive or both negative. Again we start with the two particles co-located, but in this case the fields do not cancel each other, they combine to produce a spherical field of twice the strength (and hence four times the energy) of a single charged particle. Thus the surrounding dielectric medium is already significantly “displaced”, and it contains energy in all those stretched “springs”. If we now separate the two particles by some distance, some cancellation of the fields is introduced (most notably in the region between them, where the fields point in opposite directions), and the fields are less additive in other regions. As a result, the stress and displacement of the dielectric medium is reduced, as is the amount of energy stored in the field. The released energy as the particles move further apart corresponds to a force of repulsion between the two positively (or two negatively) charged particles. The further apart we move the particles, the more energy is removed from the field, and we again approach the energy of the fields of two individual isolated particles. (This is less than the energy of the original single field with twice the strength, because the energy is proportional to the square of the field strength.)

Toward the end of his 1964 paper, Maxwell inserted a brief note regarding the force of gravitation. He had commented previously on the formal similarities between the electric, magnetic, and gravitational fields, but now, after describing his energy-based model for the electric (and magnetic) forces between charges, he faced an obvious difficulty when trying to account for the force of gravity in a similar way.

Gravitation differs from magnetism and electricity in this ; that the bodies concerned are all of the same kind, instead of being of opposite signs, like magnetic poles and electrified bodies, and that the force between these bodies is an attraction and not a repulsion, as is the case between like electric and magnetic bodies.

To be more explicit, suppose we regard the force of gravitation as arising from the actions of a field, and suppose the presence of a gravitational field represents a certain energy content. The stronger the field, the more energy it contains. Now if analyze a pair of massive particles, we find that when they are initially co-located, we have a field with twice the intensity of the field of either particle individually, and as we move the particles apart, the integral of the squared field strength (i.e., the total energy content of the field) drops, just as in the case of the electric field of two positively charged particles. Since the energy of the combined gravitational field drops as the particles are moved apart, it follows (by Maxwell’s reasoning) that there is a force of repulsion, not attraction, between the particles. The force of gravity predicted by this simple energy-based reasoning is in the wrong direction. Indeed this reasoning implies that it is impossible for “like” charges to attract each other – at least if their interaction can be represented as a continuous field.

The only possibility that Maxwell could see for salvaging the field-based approach to gravity was if we suppose that a massive body contributes negatively to the energy of the gravitational field in its vicinity. It would then be the most negative when the two particles are co-located, and become somewhat less negative as they are moved apart. Since the change in energy as the particles are moved apart would be positive, so this would represent a force of attraction. However, Maxwell was not prepared to contemplate negative energy (notice that, since energy is proportional to the square of the field strength, a negative energy would imply an imaginary field strength), so he suggested that we could postulate a huge positive background energy content for empty space, and then we could suppose that the presence of matter somehow diminishes the energy of this background field in its vicinity. To ensure that the total energy density of the field at any point is never negative, he said the background field stress would need to be at least as great as that of the strongest gravitational field anywhere in the universe. (He apparently ruled out the possibility of point-like masses, which would require the background stress to be infinite.)

"The assumption, therefore, that gravitation arises from the action of the surrounding medium in the way pointed out, leads to the conclusion that every part of this medium possesses, when undisturbed, an enormous intrinsic energy, and that the presence of dense bodies influences the medium so as to diminish this energy wherever there is a resultant attraction. As I am unable to understand in what way a medium can possess such properties, I cannot go any further in this direction in searching for the cause of gravitation."

http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath613/kmath613.htm

[sketch1946]

G'day Charles,
Is it time for a big clean up of physics,
some back-to-the-drawing-board sort of stuff?

Here's a very interesting article by Chan Rasjid:
(Challenging E=mc2)
http://emc2fails.com/wp/index.php/2016/ ... ity-wrong/

Again I would really appreciate your thoughts on:
"A Critical Analysis of Universality and Kirchhoff's Law:
A Return to Stewart’s Law of Thermal Emission"
Pierre-Marie Robitaille
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.1625.pdf

[CharlesChandler]

Seems like some real physics is happening...

Thanks, and yes, it looks like this is the real deal. I have toyed with a lot of models, and usually, they don't last long before they break for one reason or another, but this one refuses to break, and continues to yield new insights.

What's your take on the source and extreme energies of the cosmic 'rays'?

I'm not sure that they're "cosmic" (i.e., originating from very far away). The interstellar medium is thicker than the heliosphere, with a mean free path less than a centimeter. So anything coming from a nearby star would encounter a lot of collisions between there and here, and wouldn't still possess its original energy. Most of the "cosmic rays" that impact the Earth's atmosphere are probably generated within our own solar system.

Do you have a model for the sun?

I have a detailed model of The Sun.

Have you a model for the electric field between galaxies?

I mention it in my paper on Galaxies.

Do you have a model for comets?

I haven't done a paper dedicated to them, but a number of the basic principles are covered in my paper on bolides. For example, I don't think that the tail of a comet (or of a bolide for that matter) is made of material from the object itself -- otherwise, it would disintegrate far faster, and show much more drag force. Rather, they're just the visible effects of the object on the medium, more like a vapor trail from a jet, or a trace in a bubble chamber.

Hi Charles,
What do you think of the theory that magnetism is just part of the electric field?

What is your view of this paper?
"The Unified Theory – Electricity, Magnetism, Gravity and Mechanics"
Julius Pretterebner
https://arxiv.org/html/physics/9908024

That's interesting stuff, but I haven't ventured much into that realm -- almost everything that I've done has been at the macroscopic scale.

Electromagnetism and the problem of 'action at a distance':

I just go with the idea that forces are known by their effects, and can be quantified without knowing whether or not they are acting at a distance. If there is a lower-level insight, somebody else will get it.

Here's a very interesting article by Chan Rasjid: (Challenging E=mc2)

I totally agree with his position that Relativity is fundamentally wrong, and that it is just a huge, deliberately over-complicated mess.

Again I would really appreciate your thoughts on:
"A Critical Analysis of Universality and Kirchhoff's Law:
A Return to Stewart’s Law of Thermal Emission"
Pierre-Marie Robitaille
https://arxiv.org/pdf/0805.1625.pdf

Robitaille's work is clear & crisp -- I recommend it even to people not specifically interested in any of the topics covered, just because of his highly factual, insightful, and clear style. His work on black-body radiation is the first advance since the Relativists got ahold of it. I diverge from Robitaille on the source of the solar black-body radiation -- I think that it is coming from a supercritical fluid, instead of from a hydrogen crystal. But the foundations of his work are quite solid.

[sketch1946]

Hi Charles,
Thanks for the reply, much appreciated,

Boy I feel silly for asking you if you have a model for the sun!
Haha... "Do you have a model for the sun?"
(Like asking Einstein if he has any thoughts on energy....)

I haven't finished reading all your papers,
that's going to take a while...
They're very impressive to say the least

I'll keep quiet for a while, and try to ask more intelligent questions next time

[sketch1946]

Hi Charles,
Thanks for that reply,
Your reply was very encouraging, more often than not I get flak...

How can the solar wind accelerate different chemical ions at different speeds? Is there an electric field that accelerates these particles due to their different charges?

"The solar wind is not like wind on Earth. Here on Earth, atmospheric winds carry nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor along together; all species move with the same speed and they have the same temperature.
The solar wind, however, is much stranger. Chemical elements of the solar wind such as hydrogen, helium, and heavier ions, blow [sic ] at different speeds; they have different temperatures; and, strangest of all, the temperatures change with direction.

"We have long wondered why heavier elements in the solar wind move faster and have higher temperatures than the lighter elements," says Kasper. "This is completely counterintuitive."

The ion cyclotron theory explains it: Heavy ions resonate well with ion cyclotron waves. Compared to their lighter counterparts, they gain more energy and heat as they surf [sic ].

https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/s ... _solarwind
Surfing ions, sounds quite trendy....

Since all the suns in all the galaxies presumably have similar solar 'winds' and heliospheres, where does all that radiation go? In your opinion, are all the charges ultimately balanced within each solar system, or is there a wider system involved, ie interstellar fields?
and so, does the intergalactic medium originate from the stars, or is it just floating around out there.. What causes the ions impacting the Earth from either the intergalactic medium or our own galaxy, to accelerate so much to produce such high energies to even penetrate mines on Earth? Is there the same phenomenon of different ions traveling at different speeds happening in the IGM?

If the sun is producing protons and alpha particles, and these are accelerating towards the heliosphere, what can be producing this strange spiral ballerina dress shape? I get the sun is rotating, but something must drive the solar wind to reach a threefold increase in speed as it accelerates outward from the sun?

ie there must be a nett negative potential at the heliosphere? But if that were so, how then could electrons be accelerated? If the sun has magnetic north and south poles, shouldn't this polarity be reflected out into the heliosphere?

Where can I find reliable information on this electromagnetic field in the entire heliosphere? I have read statements like 'the magnetic field is embedded in the solar wind' which I don't understand...

“But,” says Adam Szabo of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, “solar wind does something that steam in your kitchen never does. As steam rises from a pot, it slows and cools. As solar wind leaves the sun, it accelerates, tripling in speed as it passes through the corona. Furthermore, something inside the solar wind continues to add heat even as it blows into the cold of space."

Finding that "something" has been a goal of researchers for decades. In the 1970s and 80s, observations by two German/US Helios spacecraft set the stage for early theories, which usually included some mixture of plasma instabilities, magnetohydrodynamic waves, and turbulent heating. Narrowing down the possibilities was a challenge. The answer, it turns out, has been hiding in a dataset....

Amazing what you can find if you keep looking? An electric field hidden in an old tape-based dataset? But no, it appears to be just protons that are just chasing down and 'heating' up a 'gas'....

Ion cyclotron waves are made of protons that circle in wavelike-rhythms around the sun's magnetic field. According to a theory developed by Phil Isenberg (University of New Hampshire) and expanded by Vitaly Galinsky and Valentin Shevchenko (UC San Diego), ion cyclotron waves emanate from the sun; coursing through the solar wind, they heat the gas to millions of degrees and accelerate its flow to millions of miles per hour. Kasper's findings confirm that ion cyclotron waves are indeed active, at least in the vicinity of Earth where the Wind probe operates.

How can protons 'heat' the 'gas'? I guess these dancing protons in 'wavelike-rhythms' kinda fits with the 'ballerina skirt' story....
https://science.nasa.gov/science-news/s ... solarwind/

"The coronal and solar wind plasmas are highly electrically conductive, meaning the magnetic field lines and the plasma flows are effectively "frozen" together and the magnetic field cannot diffuse through the plasma on time scales of interest. In the solar corona, the magnetic pressure greatly exceeds the plasma pressure and thus the plasma is primarily structured and confined by the magnetic field. With increasing altitude through the corona, solar wind acceleration results in the flow momentum exceeding the restraining magnetic tension force and the coronal magnetic field is dragged out by the solar wind to form the HMF.

I did read your paper on the sun, which seems to tell a quite different story about the forces in the corona, making this information, well, truth-challenged?

The dynamic pressure of the wind dominates over the magnetic pressure through most of the Solar System (or heliosphere), so that the magnetic field is pulled into an Archimedean spiral pattern (the Parker spiral[3]) by the combination of the outward motion and the Sun's rotation.

I can't understand the physics of this.... how can a 'wind' 'dominate' a magnetic field? Are there some sort of 'poles' at the sun's equator to cause this rotating field? I can understand moving plasma creating its own magnetic field? The shape of the ballerina skirt suggests pulsing of some sort?

"Depending on the polarity of the photospheric foot print, the heliospheric magnetic field spirals inward or outward; the magnetic field follows the same shape of spiral in the northern and southern parts of the heliosphere, but with opposite field direction. These two magnetic domains are separated by a two current sheet (an electric current that is confined to a curved plane). This heliospheric current sheet has a shape similar to a twirled ballerina skirt, and changes in shape through the solar cycle as the Sun's magnetic field reverses about every 11 years."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interplan ... etic_field
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_tension_force

Does this 11 year cycle suggest Jupiter is involved?

[CharlesChandler]

How can the solar wind accelerate different chemical ions at different speeds? Is there an electric field that accelerates these particles due to their different charges?

Exactly -- the Sun has a net negative charge, and the heliosphere has a net positive charge. Thus particles will be accelerated in that field according to their charge. Heavier elements, capable of greater sustained degrees of ionization, will experience more acceleration. Lighter elements are harder to ionize, so they spend less time in the ionized state, and get less acceleration. No ion cyclotron theory required. Furthermore, the solar wind accelerates as it moves away from the Sun. This makes no sense in Newtonian terms, as if the solar wind was just boiling off of the surface of the Sun. But it makes nothing but sense if an electric field is accelerating particles, where they get moving faster and faster the longer they are accelerated in that field.

Since all the suns in all the galaxies presumably have similar solar 'winds' and heliospheres, where does all that radiation go? In your opinion, are all the charges ultimately balanced within each solar system, or is there a wider system involved, ie interstellar fields?

I think that the stellar systems are net-neutral, with negatively charged stars and positively charged "heliospheres".

Does the intergalactic medium originate from the stars, or is it just floating around out there?

I think that the intergalactic medium, and the interstellar medium inside galaxies, is just what's left of the primordial plasma that didn't get caught up in the star formation process.

What causes the ions impacting the Earth from either the intergalactic medium or our own galaxy, to accelerate so much to produce such high energies to even penetrate mines on Earth?

I think that the high energy particles originated from inside our own solar system. Average particle speeds in the solar wind can exceed 700 km/s, so that's plenty high energy enough to penetrate the atmosphere, and even the solid Earth.

Alfvén, H. (1949): On the Solar Origin of Cosmic Radiation. Physics Reviews, 75 (11): 1732

Is there the same phenomenon of different ions traveling at different speeds happening in the IGM?

I'm not sure.

If the sun is producing protons and alpha particles, and these are accelerating towards the heliosphere, what can be producing this strange spiral ballerina dress shape?

The ballerina thing is a bit of a simplification. Active regions on the Sun's surface spew out particles, and this traces a spiral pattern as they propagate away from the Sun. But there isn't anything guaranteeing a continuous stream out of the Sun, including one active region above the equator, though a line of active regions crossing the equator, down to another active region below the equator. There can actually be two active regions, one above the equator and one below, both at the same longitude. This wouldn't inscribe a Parker's Spiral at all, or if we must think of a ballerina's skirt, now she has a loose-fitting blouse.

Analogously, take a volley ball, and poke holes in it to match wherever there are currently active regions on the Sun. Then plug a garden hose into the volley ball, to get water spraying out of the holes. Now spin the volley ball -- this will produce a somewhat more complex set of overlapping streams -- it won't be just one continuous sheet of water, because of the irregular pattern of holes.

Scarfs would actually make a better analogy than skirts, since it's a point-source stream, not a sheet.

If the sun has magnetic north and south poles, shouldn't this polarity be reflected out into the heliosphere?

It does, but the field density isn't very strong to begin with (i.e., 1 gauss on average), and the field density relaxes with distance from the Sun.

Where can I find reliable information on this electromagnetic field in the entire heliosphere?

Here's a good place to start.

May, H. D. (2008): A Pervasive Electric Field in the Heliosphere. IEEE Transactions on Plasma Science, 36 (5): 2876-2879

May, H. D. (2010): A Pervasive Electric Field in the Heliosphere (Part II). viXra, Astrophysics: 1005.0090

I have read statements like 'the magnetic field is embedded in the solar wind'

The electric current streaming away from the Sun is a Birkeland current, so it rotates around an axis, and there's a magnetic field running along that axis.

How can protons 'heat' the 'gas'?

With astro-babble.

I guess these dancing protons in 'wavelike-rhythms' kinda fits with the 'ballerina skirt' story....

I have never observed a ballerina's skirt getting warmer with distance from her, so I need some funding so I can research that.

"The coronal and solar wind plasmas are highly electrically conductive, meaning the magnetic field lines and the plasma flows are effectively "frozen" together and the magnetic field cannot diffuse through the plasma on time scales of interest. In the solar corona, the magnetic pressure greatly exceeds the plasma pressure and thus the plasma is primarily structured and confined by the magnetic field. With increasing altitude through the corona, solar wind acceleration results in the flow momentum exceeding the restraining magnetic tension force and the coronal magnetic field is dragged out by the solar wind to form the HMF.

Astro-babble.

Does this 11 year cycle suggest Jupiter is involved?

Possibly.

[sketch1946]

Thanks again for that, Charles,
Much appreciated

I'll try to finish reading all the links before asking any more questions

[comingfrom]

What never gets mentioned for some reason, is photonic radiation.

The Sun shines.
It is throwing photons.
Ions and electrons that happen to be present in this field are propelled along by the photons.

Saying that Protons cause the heating of solar wind only begs the question,
what is propelling the protons, and keeping them hot?

Photonic radiation explains why both negative and positive charged particles are in the wind.
It explains why heavier particles are accelerated faster... because they are bigger, and so receive more hits from photons than lighter particles do.
It explains the temperature.
Most of the photons are in the infrared range, which is heat.
The particles are being hit by infrared, and aren't encountering any air molecules to share it with, as steam from boiling water does.

We can't measure the photonic field.
Our detectors are only capable of detecting electrons and ions and bigger.
But we know the photons are there.
We know this because the Sun and stars shine, and radiate heat.

The problem came in when photons were assigned no mass, and no radius.
If photons were considered to be real physical things, it would explain a lot.
If photons are real objects, their energy can be transferred by direct physical contact.

~Paul

[sketch1946]

Hi Charles,
A few questions
Still trying to understand the geometry of this ballerina skirt...

In your model do you have the 'point' source of a Birkeland current as the size of a cell on the sun?
Did I read that correctly?
1 Mm? in ordinary human terms, 1000km?
Is this one great tornado, or is it some sort of dynamic fractal cross section,
or composed of smaller tubes?

Do you have a large spiral consisting of multiple molecules in this current? with sorting according to the mass of the ions as well as the charges?

Then you have a toroidal magnetic field above the corona?

So this one Birkeland Current is propelled through the magnetic field in the same sort of mechanism as a solenoid? Does it have to be bounded by other currents, or can they be a single event?

Then the ions are made to rotate by being charged particles moving through a magnetic field?

So if the analogy was the sun had electrically charged hair, then this effectively makes dreadlocks?

Cool...

I often wondered why treehuggers wore dreadlocks, it must be some deeper connection...

Seriously, what sustains the radius of this ion tornado? Is it like a tornado?

Once through the photosphere and out into space, what sustains the radius?
is it repulsion from the next dreadlock, I can understand that
or is it that there are charged negative particles whirling around oppositely charged positive particles in a sort of braided rope configuration that somehow sustains itself 'until far away when the accelerating protons of the solar wind 'catch up' and electrically dismantle the double layer effect?

I understand dimly that this three dimensional geometry allows the acceleration of charged particles in both directions, up to relativistic speeds, approaching the speed of light, ions are accelerated differentially with speeds related to their mass and individual charges?
These have a double layer?
The whole current creates its own magnetic field?

Once expelled from the sun, the tails of these currents are pulled around by the rotating magnetic field of the sun, and presumable get chopped off or squeezed off at the sun, but continue out towards the heliosphere by their own momentum?

I've seen images of experiments that show the streamer effect on a charged cylinder demostrating a model Aurora... they appear to be fairly widely separated, ie a 'current sheath' seems to be separated by quite a few diameters from the next?
Are the Aurorae a different shape from when they leave the sun, when they arrive at the earth's polar regions after interacting with the Earth's magnetic field and magnetosphere?
Do we still have accelerated ions in both directions within these sheaths?

Sometimes the polarity of the sun's magnetic field changes, and the Birkeland currents get sucked back where they came from if they're still close enough to the sun?

While this is going on, the expelled protons that have escaped the suns corona, repelled by their positive charge, are then steadily accelerated to speed of approx 600-700km per sec by the time they hit the heliosphere?

And this 10,000km thick 'current sheet' that flaps in the wind... it separates north and south hemispheres where the polarities are mostly reversed?

And the suns magnetic poles can float around all over the place, sometime disappearing and sometimes reversing, sometimes the sun has for example multiple magnetic poles?

This heliosphere geometry and underlying electromagnetic physics isn't exactly trivial

[CharlesChandler]

If photons were considered to be real physical things, it would explain a lot.

Well, it would "explain" a lot, but would the full list of expectations of that explanation stand up to laboratory and/or in situ tests? On closer inspection, the expectations are not met.

Photonic radiation explains why both negative and positive charged particles are in the wind.

Yes, but...

It explains why heavier particles are accelerated faster... because they are bigger, and so receive more hits from photons than lighter particles do.

Actually, the heavier particles are accelerated in the opposite direction from the lighter particles, so photonic pressure isn't going to work. Hydrogen is accelerated outward, along with the electron strahl coming out of the Sun, while iron is drawn back into the Sun as "coronal rain", sometimes at relativistic velocities. This makes sense if there is an electric field, with the Sun negative and the heliosphere positive -- the electrons are being pulled outward, and the highly ionized iron is being pulled inward, while the weakly ionized hydrogen is subjected to what's called "electron drag" -- if it's neutrally charged, it isn't affected by the electric field, and being a light atom, collisions with the electron stream accelerate the hydrogen atoms in the same direction.

It explains the temperature.

It actually doesn't explain the temperature increase in the corona. The power density of the solar radiation should fall off with the square of the distance from the source, meaning that the heating should be the greatest nearest the Sun. If there is a cumulative effect from the heating, you could argue that the temperature will continue to increase, as the particles continue to get accelerated by photons. But the temperature actually drops just above the photosphere, and then starts climbing back up again. Continuous heating doesn't allow for a drop in temperature.

Most of the photons are in the infrared range, which is heat.

Yes, but monoatomic matter can't absorb infrared radiation.

We can't measure the photonic field. Our detectors are only capable of detecting electrons and ions and bigger.

If photons were capable of accelerating atoms, we should be able to measure this in the laboratory. We can produce very intense beams of light, at any wavelength. To do the kinds of things that are attributed to photonic pressure, such as preventing the gravitational collapse of the Sun, it would definitely be a measurable force. But this has never been demonstrated. IMO, in order to leave photonic pressure open as a possibility, somebody is gonna have to run the numbers, to show exactly what kind of force it's creating in and around the Sun, and that this is below the experimental accuracy of modern laboratory science.

In conclusion, I hate to sound so critical -- ordinarily I'll give any proposal the chance to blossom. But the idea of photonic pressure has been around for almost 100 years now, having first been proposed by Eddington in the 1920s as the only way he could figure out to prevent the gravitational collapse of the Sun. It also fit nicely into Einstein's desire to equate energy with mass. So everybody bought into it, without any laboratory validation. That's OK if you're just trying to float a new hypothesis. But after 100 years, if you can't show the numbers, it's time for somebody to start wondering why. So I think that it's time to apply critical scrutiny to this hypothesis.

Still trying to understand the geometry of this ballerina skirt...

As I said offline, sometimes a lack of a clear explanation on the part of the author is evidence of a lack of a clear understanding on the part of the author, not stupidity on the part of the reader. So here, I'll attempt a better explanation, including some things that I hadn't really considered before in quite this way. If this works out, I'll update my website with the new & improved explanation & understanding (on my part).

In your model do you have the 'point' source of a Birkeland current as the size of a cell on the sun? Did I read that correctly? 1 Mm? in ordinary human terms, 1000km?

Yes, that would be the size of one granular cell, and yes, there is an electron strahl coming out of each of those cells, which stays organized as a discrete channel, well out into the heliosphere, even out at 1 AU and beyond. Those individual streams all merge into what is known as the heliospheric current sheet. So now we have to understand what compresses 3D radial ejecta into a sheet. That would be the Sun's magnetic field. Charged particles tend to follow magnetic lines of force. So if we look at the following figure, we see that the lines of magnetic force begin perpendicular to the Sun's surface, and thus the electrons streaming out of the Sun start out traveling along those lines.

But as noted elsewhere, the electron strahl can only follow the Sun's magnetic lines of force but so far, since they lead toward the equatorial plane out in the corona, and with electrons from the northern hemisphere and from the southern hemisphere converging, they can't all just accumulate on the equatorial plane, because the excess negative charges repel each other. So the electrons give up trying to follow the magnetic lines of force, and go back to obeying the dominant electric field, which carries them on out into the heliosphere. Having been pinched down at the equatorial plane, the electron stream that started out as radial ejecta from the Sun is now in planar form. So you can imagine the effect of the Sun's magnetic field like a spray nozzle that consolidates a flow. But it isn't a tubular spray nozzle -- it's a slit that emits a sheetlike spray. In the following image, I'm showing a sphere that represents the Sun, which I'm saying is emitting a flow of electrons from all over its surface. Then I'm showing (with a smoked glass texture) the constriction with a slit going all of the way around the Sun, along the equatorial plane. This is the effect of the Sun's magnetic field. Only along the equatorial plane can the electron strahl escape. So this is what produces the heliospheric current sheet.

Now all we have to do is make the slit waver, to get a Parker's Spiral into it. I'll do a drawing as soon as I can figure out how. In the meantime, just consider the possibility that sometimes, the electron strahl coming out of the Sun is more powerful at a particular point on the northern hemisphere. This might warp the slit in the northerly direction. Then a point on the southern hemisphere might start putting out a more powerful stream, warping the slit in the southerly direction. As the Sun rotates, the effect will be the ballerina's skirt.

I might need to research this a bit, to make sure that my "understanding" of the Parker's Spiral is correct, but at first blush, it sounds good.

Is this one great tornado, or is it some sort of dynamic fractal cross section, or composed of smaller tubes?

Each granular cell produces its own discrete stream, with spiraling electrons. Then those streams get squashed into a sheet by the proposed mechanism above.

Do you have a large spiral consisting of multiple molecules in this current? with sorting according to the mass of the ions as well as the charges?

It's spiraling electrons, plus some hydrogen atoms subjected to electron drag. The atoms are too hot for molecules, so it's all monoatomic hydrogen. The heavier elements, such as carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and especially iron, are more easily ionized, so there are more likely positive ions, in which case they'll be traveling in the opposite direction, toward the Sun, as coronal rain.

Then you have a toroidal magnetic field above the corona?

Yes.

So this one Birkeland Current is propelled through the magnetic field in the same sort of mechanism as a solenoid? Does it have to be bounded by other currents, or can they be a single event?

Let me know if these questions are still relevant within the new/improved explanation.

Then the ions are made to rotate by being charged particles moving through a magnetic field?

Yes, the positive ions will spiral, but remember that this will be traveling in the opposite direction, being attracted to the net negative charge of the Sun.

So if the analogy was the sun had electrically charged hair, then this effectively makes dreadlocks?

Exactly! Or how about Bozo the Clown, who apparently is a student of solar physics, since it takes a lot of hair spray to get it all consolidated into an equatorial plane like this...

http://www.tvparty.com/vgifs8/bozosolo.gif

...except with dreadlocks.

Seriously, what sustains the radius of this ion tornado? Is it like a tornado?

It isn't like a tornado in the sense that there is an internal low pressure supplying the centripetal force. Rather, it's just electrons responding to the electric field, but spiraling due to the magnetic field.

Once through the photosphere and out into space, what sustains the radius?

That's called the "gyroradius" of a charged particle in a magnetic field, which is a function of the strength of the charge, the strength of the magnetic field, and the speed of the charge through the field.

is it repulsion from the next dreadlock, I can understand that

Yes -- two parallel Birkeland currents won't merge. The following image shows a rotating electric current producing a solenoidal magnetic field.

http://charles-chandler.org/Geophysics/ ... lenoid.png

Two such currents parallel to each other will produce magnetic fields that will repel each other. So the currents will remain distinct.

Are the Aurorae a different shape from when they leave the sun, when they arrive at the earth's polar regions after interacting with the Earth's magnetic field and magnetosphere?

The aurora are the exact same thing as the helmet streamers coming out of the Sun, except in reverse. Coming out of the Sun, there is a convergence of electrons, from greater latitudes toward the equatorial plane. On arrival at the Earth's magnetosphere, the equatorial current sheet is split into components that enter the Earth's atmosphere at higher latitudes. In both cases, the particles are doing the best they can to follow the magnetic lines of force.

Do we still have accelerated ions in both directions within these sheaths?

It seems that the more strongly ionized atoms are traveling toward the Sun, while neutral atoms, especially the lighter hydrogen atoms, are being pulled away from the Sun by the electron strahl.

Sometimes the polarity of the sun's magnetic field changes, and the Birkeland currents get sucked back where they came from if they're still close enough to the sun?

I'm not sure about this.

While this is going on, the expelled protons that have escaped the suns corona, repelled by their positive charge, are then steadily accelerated to speed of approx 600-700km per sec by the time they hit the heliosphere?

Are you talking about the protons expelled by coronal mass ejections? Those are accelerated merely by the explosive nature of solar flares. The electron strahl that chases after them is what is getting accelerated to 700 km/s in the fast solar wind.

And this 10,000km thick 'current sheet' that flaps in the wind... it separates north and south hemispheres where the polarities are mostly reversed?

Yes.

And the suns magnetic poles can float around all over the place, sometime disappearing and sometimes reversing, sometimes the sun has for example multiple magnetic poles?

Yes, and then the Parker's Spiral is a lot more complex.

This heliosphere geometry and underlying electromagnetic physics isn't exactly trivial

Yep. At least if we remove the astro-babble, it becomes physical, and I think that this "can" be presented in a way that makes it accessible. But just in the process of answering these questions, I have come to a clearer and more mechanical understanding of it myself, or at least that's what it feels like. Next we can do sunspots, which are a lot more complicated. But like I said, this is worthwhile, because it's physical, and this can lead to tangible results. Astro-babble just confuses people, and doesn't lead to discoveries.

[sketch1946]

Hey, thanks Charles,
This is going great... starting to make some progress...
I was collecting some info... so I might as well plunk it in here...

Some notes on the geometry of the solar 'wind'.....

1. Solar 'wind' is composed of multiple 'flux tubes' aka Birkeland currents
2. 65,860 flux tubes are collected from seven years of measurements with the ACE spacecraft
3. The scale sizes of the flux tubes correspond to the scale sizes of granules on the solar surface.
4. Diameter of one flux tube at 1 AU: approx 55,000 km
5. Each flux tube contains a different plasma and the flux tubes move independently.
6. For a typical magnetic field strength of 6 nT at 1 AU,
100-MeV protons or 500-MeV electrons have gyroradii comparable to tube radii.
7. Hence cosmic rays and the higher-energy protons of SEPs will be scattered by the tangled-tube pattern.

If magnetic field lines are confined to the insides of the individual flux tubes, then the tangled network of flux tubes forms a “magnetic ductwork” for the transport of energetic particles in the inner heliosphere [cf. Bartley et al., 1966; Mazur et al., 2000].

The flux tubes approximately follow the Parker spiral, [aka the ballerina's skirt] but the details of energetic-particle transport will depend upon the manner in which flux tubes wander in the network. The individual flux tubes duct the electron heat flux from the Sun, suprathermal electron bursts, and the lower-energy solar energetic particle (SEP) events.

mmm still can't get the 'heat' out of the thinking?... the mechanism is surely driven by an electric field?
But the 'heat' of a moving charged particle is just its kinetic energy, and the driver is the charged walls of the double layer? My understanding is very shaky here...
The Birkeland current/aka flux tube is similar to a plasma gun? Thought I read something like that recently, in relation to Jupiter<->Io flux tube...

Inside the tubes that duct the particles, MHD turbulence will act to scatter the particles, and the scattering coefficients will depend on the properties of the turbulence inside the tubes. For higher-energy particles with gyroradii comparable to or larger than the tube diameters, the tangled-tube pattern (see Figure 1) affects particle transport by acting as a scatterer [see also Fisk and Sari, 1973]. The scattering coefficients for these high-energy particles will depend on the braiding pattern of the tube network, which may depend on Leighton-type diffusion owed to fluid motions on the photosphere [Leighton, 1964] or to Fisk-type diffusion of the flux tube connections into the magnetic carpet [Fisk and Schwadron, 2001]. For a typical magnetic field strength of 6 nT at 1 AU, 100-MeV protons or 500-MeV electrons have gyroradii comparable to tube radii. Hence cosmic rays and the higher-energy protons of SEPs will be scattered by the tangled-tube pattern.

The network of tangled, resilient flux tubes changes the flow properties of the solar wind. It has been observed previously [Borovsky, 2006] that large-scale shear flows (corotating interaction regions and coronal-mass-ejection sheaths) “fracture” along the boundaries between the flux tubes. This fractured flow differs from the flow of a homogeneous plasma. Normally, fluids are treated as a continuum: continuous and smoothly varying [cf. Shepherd, 1965; Hughes and Young, 1966; Batchelor, 1967]. These are so-called “simple fluids”. The solar wind with its resilient flux tubes is more of a “complex fluid” with underlying structure. Owing to interactions and entanglements of underlying structures, complex fluids can have properties such as elasticity (memory) and non-Newtonian viscosity [e.g., Cheremisinoff, 1988; Yoshizawa and Israelachvili, 1993; Tirrell, 1994; Ganesan et al., 2006].

<...>If the turbulence of the solar wind is indeed confined to the insides of the flux tubes, then boundary effects may be important for the turbulence. Boundaries can produce anisotropies in the turbulence [cf. Uzkan and Reynolds, 1967; Anthony and Wilmarth, 1992] and boundaries can introduce additional mechanisms to drive turbulence [cf. Hussain and Reynolds, 1975; Townsend, 1976]. Questions arise about the interpretation of the very-low-frequency fluctuations of the solar wind magnetic field and velocity; with wavelengths longer than the tube diameters, the interpretation of these fluctuations as a spectrum of Alfven waves needs to be rethought. The mechanisms by which the turbulence within the flux tubes is driven need to be explored.

<...>The quasi-steady driving intervals should have typical durations of a fraction of an hour. It remains to be seen whether this dual population of temporal changes is seen in the geomagnetic-activity indices that measure the coupling of the solar wind to the Earth's magnetosphere-ionosphere system. It is well known that magnetospheric substorms can be triggered by sudden changes in the direction of the solar wind magnetic field [e.g., Rostoker and Falthammer, 1967; Rostoker, 1983; Lyons et al., 1996].

The structure of the multiple flux tubes crossing the Earth's magnetosphere:

Hence it is suggested herein that substorm occurrences may be associated with the passages of flux tube walls over the Earth. However, not all wall passages will produce substorms; about 5 substorms occur per day [Borovsky et al., 1993] whereas about 50 flux tubes pass the Earth per day.

Also, not all substorms will have an association with walls; substorms can occur spontaneously, without identifiable triggers in the solar wind [McPherron et al., 1986; Hsu and McPherron, 2003]. The changes in the solar wind magnetic field associated with the passage of a flux tube wall should result in rapid changes in the properties of dayside reconnection, leading to sudden changes in magnetospheric flow and sudden changes in magnetosphere-ionosphere currents. Hot flow anomalies [Schwartz, 1995; Safrankova et al., 2000; Omidi and Sibeck, 2007] are caused by the interaction of tangential discontinuities with the Earth's bow shock. These anomalies produce substantial local perturbations to the properties of the solar wind plasma and its flow, producing an enhanced perturbation on the Earth's magnetosphere and ionosphere [Sibeck et al., 1999; Kataoka et al., 2002] that includes sudden large changes in the size of the magnetosphere, magnetic impulse events in the magnetosphere, sudden intensifications of aurora, and traveling convection vortices in the ionosphere.

<...>Since the solar wind plasma is filled with magnetic flux tubes from the Sun, it is not a large, homogeneous plasma.

Does this sort of geometry extend to regions outside our solar system:

Does that make the solar wind different from astrophysical plasmas of interest, such as stellar winds, the interstellar medium (ISM), accretion disks, and the intergalactic medium (IGM)?

The in situ observations of the solar wind have made the solar wind a useful laboratory to study MHD turbulence [cf. Terasawa and Scholer, 1989; Goldstein et al., 1995]; how appropriate is the extrapolation of those measurements to astrophysical plasmas?

On the contrary, could the ISM be seeded with flux tubes from stellar winds and as a result could the flux tube texture of the solar wind provide important information about the behavior of that unreachable plasma?

Source:
Borovsky, J. E. (2008), Flux tube texture of the solar wind: Strands of the magnetic carpet at 1 AU? J. Geophys. Res., 113, A08110, doi:10.1029/2007JA012684.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1 ... 12684/full

And now it seems that these flux tubes are right here on Earth!
Amazing what you can find if you look hard enough....

By creatively using a radio telescope to see in 3D, astronomers have detected the existence of tubular plasma structures in the inner layers of the magnetosphere surrounding the Earth.

"For over 60 years, scientists believed these structures existed but by imaging them for the first time, we've provided visual evidence that they are really there,"

Haha, this is funny or maybe sad, I'm not sure:

"It is to Cleo's great credit that she not only discovered this but also convinced the rest of the scientific community. As an undergraduate student with no prior background in this, that is an impressive achievement," said Ms Loi's supervisor Dr Tara Murphy, also of CAASTRO and the School of Physics at the University of Sydney.

https://phys.org/news/2015-06-astronome ... a.html#jCp
Here's a link direct to Realtime flux tube in the ionosphere... go aussies...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymZEOihlIdU

[sketch1946]

Hi Charles,
Thanks for the careful answers...

A couple minor points, are you saying all the flux tubes start out all over the surface of the sun, but get bent round and down to end up in a flat sheet, I read 10,000 km somewhere....

What is the nature of the north/south current sheet fluctuation, is it sinusoidal, or random, regular or irregular, how many fluctuations per solar 'day', ie per 360 degrees axial rotation of the sun?

Is the fluctuation one of density as well, or is it related to the repulsion of other simultaneous flux tubes?

So this would mean none of the emitted flux tubes are going to head off north or south? and miss the gathering together at the solar magnetic equator? ie make it to the heliosphere outside this 'current sheet'?

What about the protons, do they have an even distribution radially, or are some concentrated at the poles like magnetic field lines?