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The Crab Nebula as viewed by the Very Large Telescope (VLT). The inset superimposes two images: an X-ray
photograph of the Crab Nebula’s intensely energetic core, taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory; and a Hubble Telescope photograph of the same region.  Credits: Crab Nebula from VLT: FORS Team, 8.2-meter VLT, ESO; X-ray Image(inset): NASA/CXC/ASU/J. Hester et al; Optical Image (inset): NASA/HST/ASU/J. Hester et al.

Oct 03, 2006
The "Iron Sun" Debate (2)
The Myth of the Neutron Star

In his argument for the “Iron Sun”, Oliver Manuel relies on a popular theoretical concept—the “neutron star”. Electrical theorists, on the other hand, say there is no reason to believe that such exotic stars exist.

At the core of the Crab Nebula pictured above is a remarkable churning “wheel-and-axle” structure (inset) whose discovery shocked astronomers. No conventional model of supernova remnants ever anticipated exotic structures comparable to what is seen here.

Some things are known about the Crab Nebula, however. It is close to certain that it is the result of a supernova observed from Earth in 1054 A.D. The inner ring of the central “motor” has a diameter of about one light year. Intensely energetic jets stream outward from the central light source in two directions along the axis of an intense magnetic field. Additionally, observations over time have shown that rings and strands of material are moving outward on the equatorial plane at great speeds, some up to half the speed of light.

The point of light at the center of the image is a pulsar, so called because it generates pulses at radio frequencies roughly 60 times a second. (Pulses can also be observed optically and in X-rays.)

But what cause these rapid pulses? Most astronomers today attempt to interpret pulsars using a strange idea based entirely on mathematical conjectures. They say that the pulsar is a tiny spinning “neutron star”—the collapsed remains of the historic supernova.

Neutron stars were predicted theoretically in the 1930's to be the end result of a supernova explosion. For many years astronomers doubted their existence. But then, with the discovery of the first pulsar in 1967, astronomers imagined that the pulses were due to a rapidly rotating beam of radiation sweeping past the Earth. Having ignored all of the things that electricity can do quite routinely, the theorists were required to conceive a star so dense that it could rotate at the rate of a dentists drill without flying apart. So the neutron star received a second life. The energy of the star’s radiation, it was supposed, came from in-falling matter from a companion star.

The imaginative construct received no support from later observations. In the Crab Nebula, what we now see is not gravitational accretion, but material accelerated away from the central star. In fact, all of the weird and wonderful things said about neutron stars, such as the super-condensed "neutronium" or "quark" soup from which they are claimed to have formed, lie outside the realm of verifiable science. They are abstractions disconnected from nature, but required to save a paradigm that has no other force than gravity to provide compact sources of radiation.

Oliver Manuel and the Iron Sun advocates have taken a daring step in questioning conventional fictions about the Sun. But unfortunately, they have relied upon another popular fiction. They suggest that the Sun was formed by accretion of heavy elements, chiefly iron, onto a “neutron star” following a supernova explosion. They further claim that energy from neutrons, supposedly repelled from its neutron star core, accounts for the Sun's radiant energy and the source of protons in the solar wind. The model does not explain the acceleration of the solar wind out past the planets (a crucial requirement according to electrical experts).

Such speculations, resting upon the earlier flights of cosmological fancy, beg the question as to the origin of all other stars. Supernovae are exceedingly rare events, and there is no sound reason to believe that neutron stars are even physically possible.

However appealing the original logic may have been to some, the neutron star model should have been discarded when pulsars were found with supposed “spin” and cooling rates that required the mathematicians to conjure ever more dense and exotic particles–like quarks–that have never been observed.

Critics of the “neutron star” hypothesis say that it is a violation of common sense to speak of matter being gravitationally compressed to the point that the orbiting electrons in an atom are forced to join with the protons in the nucleus to form neutrons. The nearly 2000-fold difference in weight between the electron and the proton will ensure charge separation in an intense gravitational field. Each atom will become a tiny radial electric dipole that assists charge separation. And the electric force of repulsion is 39 orders of magnitude stronger than gravity, so extremely weak charge separation is sufficient to resist gravitational compression. The force of gravity is effectively zero in the presence of the electric force.

All of today’s popular ideas about supernovae, the supposed progenitors of neutron stars, were formulated under a gravity-only ideology that has, in recent decades, been challenged (and electric theorists would say overturned) by the discovery of plasma and powerful electric and magnetic fields in space. Supernovae have recently been identified as catastrophic stellar electrical discharges. The remnant of such a discharge cannot be the imagined rapidly spinning super-dense object: powerful electrical forces will always prevent gravitational "super-collapse."

Plasma physicists have shown (in the words of K. Healy and A. Peratt) that the pulsed radiation detected from some supernova remnants may "…derive either from the pulsar’s interaction with its environment or by energy delivered by an external circuit. …[O]ur results support the ‘planetary magnetosphere’ view, where the extent of the magnetosphere, not emission points on a rotating surface, determines the pulsar emission.” These concrete results do not rest on events merely imagined.  And they dovetail with facts that are now inescapable: electric discharges in plasma are fully capable of generating the exotic structures of supernova remnants seen in deep space. The "wheel and axle" form of the supernova remnant in the Crab nebula is that of a simple Faraday electric motor. Its structure also conforms to the stellar circuit diagram espoused by the father of plasma cosmology, Hannes Alfvén.

It is a pity that the “Iron Sun” researchers are not conversant with plasma cosmology and the Electric Sun model. They make a compelling case against the standard solar model, and their recent findings of electrically induced nuclear reactions on the solar surface could open a pathway to discoveries reaching well beyond solar science.
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