Electric Sun: A Quantitative Calculation

[psychegram]

* Jim, it's good to have all your caveats listed after my post re calculating stellar energy. I didn't want to complicate the basic formula by discussing such caveats right away. But in the next post [yours] was convenient.

* Psychegram, spectral line blanketing is interesting. I hadn't heard of that. How large a range of frequencies or wavelengths are typically blanketed in that way? And what kinds of sources produce such line blanketing? Stars, quasars, galaxies, GRBs, pulsars, supernovae, comets, electric discharges, UFOs?
* Are you a member of the NPA, which is discussed at http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... f=3&t=4284? They seem to have great speakers and articles.

I'm not really sure what the wavelength range is for line blanketing, off the top of my head. What really matters is the temperature of the star: the cooler it gets, the greater the number of atomic lines, and line blanketing generally only becomes a factor when there's so many lines they all crowd together. Mostly it's M and K class stars that it affects.

And no, not a member of NPA. Won't have time for that this summer I'm afraid....

[jjohnson]

Thanks, psychegram. I like your informative and knowledgeable approach to this sort of "analysis". As you know, the EU ideas are still being developed. Nereid's suggestion to defend the Sun's "circuitry" or method of operation from the EU perspective is useful, but I know that it is not advanced enough to be taken up seriously in a refereed journal in the sort of debate Nereid has in mind. IMHO it is too early for anyone to be trying to dismiss the EU set of conceptual ideas from a scientific perspective because they have not been prepared for that yet.

Still, we have to keep moving, and making incremental progress is hardly a process foreign to science. Just look at the progress being made in Tokomak confinement fusion over the past 5 or 6 decades! "Snail's pace" doesn't do it justice, possibly because it is too difficult to re-create the conditions assumed to exist in the solar core where fusion has been assumed to take place. Two assumptions too many in a single sentence!

One of the listed difficulties in the list of anomalies about the Sun is that it is the only known case where scientists postulate that thermal transfer occurs by a radiative process. This odd process ends up creating big upwelling and downwelling "columns" of hot gas, much as if it were a boiling pot of water - an analogy often used in descriptions to the lay public. We, and solar scientists, I believe, all know that the sun's visible surface and likely down to an indeterminate depth, is in the plasma state. What is under that is one of those sweet mysteries that we just can't get to, to observe directly. The electric hypothesis, to over-dignify it, I suppose, offers an alternate viewpoint to consider carefully, if not yet quantitatively in depth. But is has the ring of common sense and plausibility to it, and it is a simpler form of solution if it can be made to show that it works the way it is supposed.

That doesn't make it right, any more than the sheer number of scientists, who believe the current model is "right", makes that theory so. The EU and the Standard Model are not in a popularity contest. In fact, given the still-unprepared state of EU as theory, it is not a contender for the interest of mainstream science just yet, anyway. That leaves us free to play with and experiment and hypothesize with it all we want. -and perhaps we can interest other groups who may not (or may!) be astronomers and physicists in these conceptual ideas who would like to help see it through to the contender stage. That's my interest here. Give it time; then give it a hearing. Meanwhile, let's have fun in a serious sort of way.

[Lloyd]

* It seems to me that EU Theory is on a much firmer basis than conventional theory, so, if any other theory is a contender, EU Theory should be even more so. I don't see any sense in acting as if EU Theory is second-rate. I think it's better to be bold and confident, not submissive to establishment "authority". They're the ones with No Clothes, not us. I don't buy at all that EU Theory isn't yet ready to go head-to-head with anyone.

[D_Archer]

Hi pshychegram,

I dont know if you are familiar with the iron sun idea. See this : http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/

Maybe this would give you more to work with with your calculations, an iron core would at least change the resistivity.

Regards,
Daniel

[webolife]

Wow, Daniel, that is one provocative set of images, and video sequences...
A solid Sol! We need a thread just to discuss this amazing prospect in terms of EU.

[TheMindWars]

Maybe this is why mainstream is having a problem finding Neutrinos, after all, if the sun is a nuclear fusion process should they not find a great deal of these little blighters.

The Solar Neutrino Problem

For more than twenty years, the Homestake Solar Neutrino Experiment in the Homestake Gold Mine in South Dakota has been attempting to measure neutrino fluxes from space; in particular, this experiment has been gathering information on solar neutrino fluxes. The results of this experiment have been checked against predictions made by standard solar models and it has been discovered that only one-third of the expected solar neutrino flux has been detected. This "Where are the missing neutrinos?" question is known as the Solar Neutrino Problem.

And it is not just the Homestake experiment that is detecting a shortage of neutrinos. Several other experiments, including Kamiokande II, GALLEX, and SAGE, have noticed a definite neutrino shortfall.

[Lloyd]

Webb said: ... that is one provocative set of images, and video sequences... A solid Sol! We need a thread just to discuss this amazing prospect in terms of EU.

* We discussed that extensively in 15 pages for 2 days in March 2008 at the Iron Sun Theories thread at http://www.thunderbolts.info/forum/phpB ... ?f=3&t=148. Several TPODs also discussed it.
* The images on that website are older than that. Most of the material for the site is no longer available. But Oliver Manuel's sites may have it. The images are not actual images, but I think approximations of ionic iron locations, which is plasma, not solid. It's the photosphere after all. At least I think that's what it is.
* It seems to be possible that the Sun and gas giant planets are solid below their atmospheres, but it's not highly likely at this point. The photosphere is 5800°K, which I think is a little hotter than the melting point of iron. Stavros Tassos may have helpful insights. At http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=66b0jzyh Thornhill said: Jupiter's Great Red Spot occasionally shows clear hexagonal morphology too, which indicates that it is an electrical tornado connected to some surface electrical anomaly beneath the clouds. I think he told me once that he thinks the surface is solid. I'm not entirely positive though. At http://www.firmament-chaos.com/planets_jupiter.html Ackerman said: There is much evidence now available corroborating the solid makeup of Jupiter. A solid boundary below the atmosphere is required to explain the formation of the zonal wind belts that encompass the planet, just as the trade winds on Earth... The fact that the Great Red Spot has remained at the same latitude (-23 degrees) for over the three hundred and forty years that it has been observed, is clear evidence that its source is on the solid surface of the planet. The trade winds on Earth are guided by the jet streams, I'm pretty sure, and I think they're influenced by electrical forces. He discusses some of the other planets too on the website. I like his info about Venus especially. He said the dense lower atmosphere is due to sulfur, not CO2; the CO2 is only above the sulfur.
* Thornhill has said that the rocky planets were ejected from one or more of the gas giants and the latter may have fissioned from a star; and I think the density of each may have been about the same.

[jjohnson]

I respect and like what you are saying, lloyd. Far from lying down, I'm all for promoting and improving EU theory. I'm just pointing out that it's just not coherently organized and quantitatively described well enough yet to, according to the mainstream's set of rules of acceptance for publication and therefore discussion, engage as a full-blown theory. That italicized qualifier is all I'm noting. I think of it as a theory; you do, too; and so do a lot of people. That the mainstream chooses to use the semantically dismissive device of saying, "it's not a theory, so case closed" doesn't make them right.

My dislike of having a debate with Nereid on her terms is less about "who wins" than about "who's wasting their time?"
I would prefer that we go ahead charting our own course and offering up our own publications and engaging in our own direction of discourse. Of course there is a lot of useful, good science out there - we need not be dismissive of that. We use it, in fact. But why put lipstick on that pig [that's just an expression, Nereid; it is not meant to be about you or anyone else] when we can be doing more useful stuff?

The EU model covers a lot of territory already, and makes predictions and observations that rival and often exceed those of others working in these fields. It is founded on solid principles laid down well over a century ago, which got put aside as more "attractive", ideas became popular. Rather than incorporating and unifying physics and astronomy and a number of other disciplines, scientists threw the electric baby out with the bathwater and bought into the gravity cosmology and invented stuff they cannot see and cannot describe much better than, "it must be there".

EU is an evolving theory. People here are looking more closely into the very tiny, root causes of mass and charge and gravity and all the related interactions. Daniel Archer and others are widening the ideas about the Sun, some of which may be different from what, for example, Don Scott may believe about it, but it's all being done in the spirit of using available data and observations and information from publicly available science sources but using forensic techniques to tease out a better way of interpreting what is going on and how things might really work.

I find this very exciting and absorbing. Let's keep encouraging each other and finding more people who can be interested in looking into this growing movement and helping it out. The Iron Sun stuff and Prof. Oliver Manuel's ideas about what powers the Sun are intriguing, and I want to see more. And see more predictions, too.

Jim

[Aristarchus]

Hi pshychegram,

I dont know if you are familiar with the iron sun idea. See this : http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/

Maybe this would give you more to work with with your calculations, an iron core would at least change the resistivity.

Regards,
Daniel

This is one of the most fascinating reads I've encountered. Thank you, and hopefully this post serves as a <bump> for others that might have missed it. The multiple links and source data for the latest observations are great for supplying reference citing for the future!

[webolife]

I'm sorry, Lloyd, I missed that thread. Will look back over it.

[psychegram]

An interesting bit of astronomical history ... when Copernicus first proposed his theory, it was rejected by the academics of the day on numerous grounds. Not just ideological (though there was that, too), but physical (if the Earth was moving, surely we'd be thrown off!) and - of more relevance to this thread - practical: geocentric orbits with epicycles predicted the movements of planets far more accurately and precisely than circular heliocentric orbits, which could reproduce the broad features of retrograde motion but fell flat on their face at predicting the precise positions of planets at any given time.

That didn't stop the early proponents of heliocentrism: their intuition told them their theory was right, and they followed it. Once grasped, it was so obvious that it had to be true. In essence they made a leap of faith.

And yet, they remained firmly in the minority for centuries. Kepler had to introduce the heretical idea of elliptical orbits, and then Newton had to explain them by means of gravity (which doesn't really explain them, but does a nice of job of unifying terrestrial and celestial phenomena.) It was only then that heliocentrism started to be taken seriously, not just in the academies, but by the general population.

What I'm saying with this little historical parable is that it's all very well and good that those here are convinced of the obvious truth of the electric sun. I share that enthusiasm: when I first considered the idea, it was a 'eureka' moment with quite profound implications, and not just scientific implications. BUT we have to recognize that, until such a time as the theory is fleshed out in much greater detail, it will not gain currency within the wider culture. And that means a lot of hard, thankless work on the part of those who wish to push this theory ... even harder than the work astronomers (or any other scientists) have to do, because at least they get funded and, face it, we won't (well actually I am funded, the small stipend of a grad student, but that's not for doing this work per se ... whatever I am able to contribute is time stolen from my academic responsibilities.) It means creating quantifiable models, solving calculations, direct comparison of models to data ... just learning to work with the data alone (and I do not mean looking at pictures) is a hard intellectual grind. It also means publishing papers ... and if (lets face it) we can't get them published in academic journals, that means we set up our OWN journals, with high standards of peer review. Public outreach is crucial, of course ... and we're certainly gaining on that front. Man-in-the-street is very receptive to these ideas. The work the TB team is doing in that regard is fantastic. But we need more people working this from the angle of direct, hands-on science.

And I totally think we can do this.

[psychegram]

Hi pshychegram,

I dont know if you are familiar with the iron sun idea. See this : http://www.thesurfaceofthesun.com/

Maybe this would give you more to work with with your calculations, an iron core would at least change the resistivity.

Regards,
Daniel

I haven't come across that website before, but I have come across the idea of an Fe sun. Seems to make a lot of sense, actually ... especially in light of the evidence for a growing Earth, which would imply that all celestial bodies grow, which would imply that stars start - or can start - as planets ... which would imply they have planets at their cores ... and then give birth to planets later on ... a very biomimetic metaphor from which to describe celestial phenomena. Very appealing.

At any rate, thank you for the link! I shall certainly try and take the time to review the information therein.

[Dotini]

Just at the present moment there is a truly gigantic filament suspended above the sun's photosphere stretching over 700,000 km - twice as long as the separation between Earth and Moon.
http://spaceweather.com/ <-- Archive April 9, 2011
It's not easy for such a filament to remain suspended indefinitely above the stellar surface, and indeed a collapse is possible. Filaments falling onto the sun can trigger explosions called "Hyder flares." Is one in the offing?

Does EU/PC provide any unique sort of insight into the Hyder flare?
http://www.ips.gov.au/Educational/2/4/1
Of late, the Hyder mechanism has come into question. Some people (notably Zirin) have questioned whether infall occurs, stating that the magnetic reconfiguration must always produce ejection. The respective roles of flares and CME's in solar active processes has also been hotly debated, and this has implications for the exact mechanism of Hyder flares. We certainly have enough observational evidence to show that Hyder flares can be associated with both CME's and energetic particle production. For the moment, the question of Hyder flare production mechanism appears unresolved, and will probably be sidelined until the more significant (and undoubtedly related) issue of CME - flare production mechanism is sorted out.

The bottom line is that at this stage in solar physics we do not really know what produces a flare nor what produces a CME. There are competing theories, but all tend to have deficiencies with respect to matching the observational evidence. We certainly believe that they all depend on the reconfiguration of magnetic fields as their primary energy source, but in the final analysis, we really only believe this because we can conceive of no other solar energy source of sufficient magnitude.

Respectfully submitted,
Dotini

[Lloyd]

But we need more people working this from the angle of direct, hands-on science.

* There are a lot more people doing such hands-on plasma science than most folks here seem to realize. See for example the NPA thread at http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/v ... f=3&t=4284. Kanarev, Lucas et al are doing great research into the microcosm. Santilli's hadronic mechanics and Stavros Tassos' material about Earth's interior are providing major insights too. And all show the influence of electrical forces.
* You also said it needs to be strictly peer-reviewed, but peer review is what suppresses alternative theories, no matter how good they are. I see peer review as brain-washing, as occurs in conventional education and major media. Instead of peers deciding which theories to consider, it should be knowledgeable members of the public who decide, such as us. Conventional government, which pays for science, is also in very great need of reform.

Does EU/PC provide any unique sort of insight into the Hyder flare?

* I certainly think so. Any long filamentary structure can likely only be held together by electric and magnetic fields. Gravitation can only form spheres, when there's enough mass involved to gravitate significantly. Explosions tend to form spherical dispersals. Solar scientists notice the influence of magnetic fields, but what they keep refusing to consider is that magnetic fields are produced by electric currents.

[psychegram]

But we need more people working this from the angle of direct, hands-on science.

* There are a lot more people doing such hands-on plasma science than most folks here seem to realize. See for example the NPA thread at http://thunderbolts.info/forum/phpBB3/v ... f=3&t=4284. Kanarev, Lucas et al are doing great research into the microcosm. Santilli's hadronic mechanics and Stavros Tassos' material about Earth's interior are providing major insights too. And all show the influence of electrical forces.
* You also said it needs to be strictly peer-reviewed, but peer review is what suppresses alternative theories, no matter how good they are. I see peer review as brain-washing, as occurs in conventional education and major media. Instead of peers deciding which theories to consider, it should be knowledgeable members of the public who decide, such as us. Conventional government, which pays for science, is also in very great need of reform.

Does EU/PC provide any unique sort of insight into the Hyder flare?

* I certainly think so. Any long filamentary structure can likely only be held together by electric and magnetic fields. Gravitation can only form spheres, when there's enough mass involved to gravitate significantly. Explosions tend to form spherical dispersals. Solar scientists notice the influence of magnetic fields, but what they keep refusing to consider is that magnetic fields are produced by electric currents.

In terms of peer review being a mechanism for the suppression of alternative theories, I actually tend to agree ... but that's peer review as currently practiced, ie, anonymous peer review. Ideally it would be primarily a form of quality control, because here's the thing: with the volume of information being published in scientific literature; the utter impossibility of the readership being expert enough to consistently distinguish good from lazy science down at the level of the nitty-gritty details of subfields; and the necessity of ensuring the information stream stays relatively unpolluted with misinformation ... it becomes necessary to have some kind of first-pass filtering process. An open peer review process, whereby at the very least the names of the reviewers were made public, would provide that filtering function whilst going a long way to avoiding abuses of power on the part of reviewers.