Pulsar, Pulsar…
Oct 13, 2010

If you presume that gravity rules the universe, you’ll look for spherical symmetry and circular forms. So a pulsar will appear to be the core of a supernova at the center of a spherical blast wave. The collapsed core will blow off a fast wind that will compress the interstellar gas into a shock wave and leave a bubble of relative emptiness behind. Seen from our distance, the shock wave will appear as a circle.

But something must have got in the way of this pulsar: Astronomers note that the pulsar and its “wind nebula” are off-center, they are moving in opposite directions, and the pulsar’s x-ray emissions have a “comet-like” shape. Lost in the glare from their brightly burning presumption is the sight that the shock wave is not circular: both the “wind nebula” and the outer “blast wave” are hexagonal.  

In the Electric Universe, energy doesn’t emanate from gravitational “point sources” that impose a spherical geometry on the energy’s distribution. Electricity comes in “cables” of Birkeland currents. They distribute energy in ways more like a lightning stroke or an aurora. Instabilities impose quasi-stable forms: “jet” and “comet-like” ones are common, as are hexagonal ones. See, for example, the auroral currents around the poles of Saturn (item 4 in link) or the hexagonal craters left by discharges to the surfaces of rocky planets and moons. 

Pulsar G327.1-1.1 is not “off-center”: it is a pinch in an x-ray jet emanating from a corner of the “wind nebula” hexagon. Diocotron instabilities, such as the swirls seen in auroras, likely have spawned small vortices in the toroidal plasmoid that is the nebula, pulling it into the hexagonal shape. Charge may have built up in one of the vortices, and a plasma-gun-like mechanism has discharged the jet and its pinch.  

The pulsar hasn’t been precisely located yet. But when found, it will likely resolve into a binary that has set up the pulsar oscillation in the circuit supplying its power.

Mel Acheson