"Kelvin-Helmholtz" instabilities in a solar plasma eruption.
 

Cloudy with a Chance of Instability
Feb 07, 2011

Clouds on the Sun are electrically charged, so dynamic structures should be described using plasma physics.

"The plasma exhibited striations and double layers; the electron distribution was non-Maxwellian; there were all sorts of oscillations and instabilities."

--- Hannes Alfvén, shortly after receiving his Nobel prize

According to a recent press release, physicists from the University of Warwick in Coventry, England discovered regions of plasma instability occurring along the edges of some solar filaments. Warwick researchers "...spotted a familiar pattern of instability on one flank of an exploding cloud of solar material that closely paralleled instabilities seen in Earth’s clouds and waves on the surfaces of seas."

The pattern seen within the exploding solar double layer was dubbed a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability because it seemed to be occurring between two regions of different velocity. In other words, fluid dynamics theory is being attached to the phenomenon in an attempt to explain its features.

The Electric Universe hypothesis is based on electrodynamic principles and not on electrostatic or kinetic behavior. Its basic premise is that celestial bodies are immersed in plasma and are connected by circuits. Since the Sun is "plugged-in" to the galaxy and to its family of planets, it behaves like a charged object seeking equilibrium with its environment.

An electric discharge in plasma creates a tube-like magnetic sheath along its axis. If enough current flows through the circuit, the discharge will cause the sheath to glow, sometimes creating a number of other sheaths within it. The sheath is called a “double layer.”

Double layers form when positive charges build up in one region of a plasma cloud and negative charges build up nearby. A powerful electric field appears between the two regions, which accelerates charged particles. The electric charges spiral in the magnetic fields, emitting X-rays, extreme ultraviolet, and sometimes gamma rays.

Toroidal filaments couple to hourglass-shaped current sheets that are subject to diocotron instabilities: the current flow through plasma sometimes forms vortices that change into distorted curlicue shapes. This phenomenon has been witnessed in many laboratory experiments, as well as in the polar aurorae.

Plasma physicist Dr. Anthony Peratt wrote: "One of the outstanding problems in the propagation of electron beams along an axial magnetic field is the breakup of the beam into discrete vortex-like current bundles when a threshold determined either by the beam current or distance of propagation is surpassed. The phenomena observed closely resembles that associated with the Kelvin-Helmholtz fluid dynamical shear instability, in which vortices develop throughout a fluid when a critical velocity in the flow is exceeded..."

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