Warning: Material contained in this story may make you wish to become a solar physicist. [
Ha ha, no! I prefer not to be lobotomized by my peers... Thanks just the same!]
Japan's Hinode spacecraft, launched in 2006 on a mission to study the sun, is beaming back movies that
astonish even seasoned investigators. [
Who have apparently never seen or heard of electrical effects in plasma?]
"That was a polar crown prominence recorded by Hinode on Nov. 30, 2006," says Dr. Thomas Berger of Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Center in Palo Alto, California. "It is a curved wall of 10,000[deg] plasma [:o
They said plasma! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!] about 90,000 km long and 30,000 km tall." [
Couldn't be a current sheet could it? Jut one possibility...] A stack of planets three Earths high would barely make it to the top.
Solar astronomers have seen prominences like this before, thousands of them, but never so clearly. The new view is
challenging long-held ideas: In the past, researchers thought of prominences as mainly static structures [
Why? For the love of Dog, why?], held motionless above the surface of the sun by magnetic force fields. [
Electric currents are anything but motionless or static! They're dynamic flows of like charged particles in the same direction at the same time or opposite charges in opposite directions at the same time. Granted, for a current of constant strength and geometry, the magnetic field generated by it may remain more-or-less static. But, the current itself is still a dynamic process.] "
Now we know those ideas are too simple. [
No kidding! See what happens when you falsely assume that magnetic fields are the only game in town and fail to track back to electric currents, per Maxwell, Ampère, Faraday, etc?] Just watch the movie!" [
It's pre-eetty, and colorful!]
Berger lists the surprises:
1. "There are dark tadpole-shaped plumes rising up from the base of the prominence. These have never been seen before and we're not sure what they are."
2. "Narrow streams of plasma at the top of the prominence are constantly falling back to the bottom, much like a waterfall." Mysteriously, the streams plummet faster than ambient magnetic forces seem to allow[!]. [
Could this be because they are responding to the presence of electric fields? A voltage drop is the most efficient way to get charged particles a-flowing!]
3. "Finally, within the wall itself, there are swirls and vortices" bearing an eerie resemblance to van Gogh's surreal Starry Night. [
Swirls and vortices? C'mon, do you really need more evidence for electric currents? NASA really needs to keep up-to-date on cutting edge research! Plasma experiment recreates astrophysical jets &
Plasma Jets on Earth]
The inescapable conclusion: "There's no such thing as a static prominence." [
No [expletive deleted] kidding...] Furthermore, he says, "we don't understand how the sun's magnetic field is doing all these things." [
Perhaps because "frozen in field lines" in plasma and "magnetic reconnection" are both incorrect paradigms! It's all about the underlying currents... Magnetic field strength depends on electric current strength. Maxwell, Ampere, Faraday and Gauss say they're related.]
[...]
It turns out that polar crown prominences pop up almost every day. They occupy a ring (or "crown") around the sun's poles bracketed approximately by solar latitudes 60o and 70o. Geometrically, the crowns resemble the auroral ovals of Earth. Instead of Northern Lights, however, the sun's ovals are filled with dancing sheets of plasma. [
Birkeland's terella whatnow? 1,
2]
Studying polar crown prominences could be a key to forecasting space weather, says Berger. The central sheets [
What kind of sheets? Please be more specific! Current sheets? Linens & Things?] form between regions of opposite-polarity magnetic field. That's significant because opposite magnetic fields bumping together tend to explode—a process [
some incorrect] physicists call "reconnection." [
Magnetic reconnection is DOA. Long live electric currents!] Polar crown prominences are thus poised to erupt and often do, forming the cores of billion-ton coronal mass ejections. "Hinode allows us to watch the process in action."
Astronomers aren't the only ones watching; nuclear physicists are paying attention, too. For decades, physicists and engineers have struggled to contain hot plasma in fusion reactors using magnetic fields. [
And yet science seems to be oblivious to the fact that the magnetic fields used in fusion reactors are created using ELECTROmagnets! You can't get the magnetic fields without the electro-!] Watching the sun manipulate plasma via magnetism may teach them some valuable tricks and, eventually, help bring the power of stars down to Earth. [
If they'd just get the relationship through their thick skulls between the magnetic fields they see and their source electric currents, they may just have something!]
"These data are leading solar physicists to reexamine theories of prominence dynamics and will certainly lead to new and exciting breakthroughs," believes Berger. [
We've all heard that line before! "We swear we'll mend our erroneous ways, and git 'er figgered out!" And yet, nothing changes... I believe it's called paradigm paralysis?]
Answers are in the offing. [
Really? Will you guys finally and tacitly acknowledge that electric currents exist and actually do things on the sun and in space?] But first, a few more movies:
1,
2,
3. [
Ooh! Something shiny! I'm sold!]
] stop soaring into the atmosphere and fall back towards the solar surface. The changes in pressure are caused by rearrangements of the Sun’s magnetic field [Which are caused by what? Ohh, right, changes in the underlying electrical currents!], a continual process that results in looping cycles of increasing and decreasing pressure and, consequentially, intermittent solar fountains.
Best to be alert and know what to do!
