Electric Universe
Continues to "Baffle" Astronomers
12/28/2007
By Michael Goodspeed
The 19th century humorist Josh
Billings once said, "There is no greater evidence of
superior intelligence than to be surprised at nothing." One
wonders how today's astronomers and astrophysicists might
feel about this statement. Space scientists continually
express surprise and perplexity over new discoveries -- from
the energetic outbursts of comets, to the electric sun/earth
connection, to the anomalous motions of galaxies, to the
vast, filamentary jets seen stretching over intergalactic
distances, our increased technological ability to detect
space phenomena has only increased astronomers' surprise and
confusion.
But the real measure of a person's intelligence -- and
integrity -- is how he or she responds to life's inevitable
surprises. Does one deny and resist these revelations,
clinging furiously to misguided beliefs? Or is one content
to be proved wrong, perhaps suffering a blow to the ego but
moving a step closer to real understanding?
Space scientists will admit to surprise or even
astonishment, but this seldom prevents them from claiming to
understand what they're seeing, even when the surprises
refute their most basic assumptions. A good example of this
is seen in astronomers' recent observations of a "baffling
cosmic explosion" that "seems to have come out of nowhere."
The explosion is a long duration gamma-ray burster.
Astronomers have long believed that such a burst is powered
by the death of a massive star. But satellite images reveal
no galaxy anywhere near the proximity of the burst.
"Here we have this very bright burst, yet it's surrounded by
darkness on all sides," said team member Brad Cenko of the
California Institute of Technology. "The nearest galaxy is
more than 88,000 light-years away, and there's almost no gas
lying between the burst and Earth."
The Space.com
report on the "explosion" reads: "Because the massive
stars believed to produce GRBs live fast and die young, they
don't have time to wander from their birthplace, which is
usually dense clouds of gas and dust inside of galaxies. So
the explosion raise [sic] the perplexing question of how a
massive star could be found so far from a galaxy.
"If a massive star died far away from any galaxy, the key
question is, how did it manage to be born there?' said team
member Derek Fox of Penn State.
Here we see investigators, though openly "baffled," still
refusing to think outside their models, even when direct
observation contradicts them. One radical possibility
they're not considering is that their fundamental
assumptions about gamma-ray bursters (GRBs) are incorrect --
they are not generated by the death of a massive star, their
ideas about star formation and the nature of stars are
incorrect, and the energies of the explosions are far less
than standard theory calculates. This is, in fact, the
position of proponents of plasma cosmology, and of the
Electric Universe.
Astronomers' beliefs about GRBs have been thrown into
disarray before. In July of 2005, a burst that lasted a
tenth of a second was followed thirty seconds later by a
150-second x-ray flash. The location of the burst was
pinpointed, and a few days later, the Hubble Space Telescope
obtained an image of the optical afterglow and the "host"
galaxy. According to conventional theories, the redshift of
this galaxy determined its distance at about two billion
light years. To appear as bright as it did, the GRB must
have given off more energy in that one-tenth of a second
than the entire galaxy gives off in a year! The only
mechanisms imaginable in a gravity-dominated universe that
could be this "energy-dense" are extreme supernovae and
neutron-star or black-hole mergers. Because no supernova was
observed and because the GRB occurred at the edge of the
galaxy (most black holes are thought to reside in galactic
cores) this GRB was considered to be the result of a merger
of neutron stars.
But as repeatedly demonstrated on the pages of
Thunderbolts.info,
redshift is not a reliable measure of an object's
distance. As far back as the 1960's, astronomer Halton Arp
began documenting instances where two or more galaxies
and/or quasars were associated, or even physically
connected, in contradiction of the assumption that their
different redshifts meant that one should be millions or
even billions of light-years farther away than the other.
Therefore, the energy of the 2005 GRB was almost certainly
much less than astronomers believe, and the "host" galaxy
appears small and faint because it really is small and faint
-- not because it's far away.
Likewise, the recently observed "baffling cosmic explosion"
may not have "come out of nowhere." Although it cannot
definitively be said from an electrical perspective what
creates gamma-ray bursters, we can say with great confidence
that they are not caused by the death of stars, and they are
electrical in nature. Astronomers study GRBs based on their
spectra and their time histories. The spectra indicate
emission of X-rays from highly excited ions and from fast
electrons. The time histories vary greatly but generally
show a fast rise of energy and a gradual fading. Sometimes
one or more lower-energy pulses precede the peak energy
pulse; often other spikes, which also show the
fast-rise-slower-decline profile, interrupt the decline in
energy.
The excited ions, fast electrons, and range of energy curves
are common properties of LIGHTNING. They occur -- at the
appropriate energy levels -- in lab discharges, atmospheric
lightning, solar flares, supernovae, and, now, in GRBs. To
try and explain these energetic patterns, conventional
theorists do what they always do when faced with the
inexplicable -- they call on invisible, untestable,
unmeasurable, super-powerful gravitational forces to do the
hard way (or the IMPOSSIBLE way) what electricity does
routinely. Experiments and computer simulations have shown
that plasma phenomena can be scaled over many orders of
magnitude -- that is, they behave in much the same manner
and obey the same principles from the atomic scale to the
galactic. In other words, the cosmic explosion that so
"baffles" astronomers is not baffling to those familiar with
experimental plasma science. It is exactly what it seems to
be -- a plasma discharge in space.
So from where might this discharge have originated? In an
Electric Universe, galaxies are not isolated objects -- they
are connected electrically. Across the immense volume of
intergalactic space, electric currents, minuscule across
short distances, possess the power to organize galactic
structure. Such currents, unrecognized by modern astronomy,
are fully capable of producing rare instances of plasma
instability -- a high-energy event provoked by converging
currents in a "z-pinch." The electric discharges provoked by
pinching currents have been studied in the plasma laboratory
for decades. And the phenomenon is incomparably more
efficient in producing GRBs than the untested, gravitational
events envisioned by mainstream theorists. Moreover,
evidence continues to mount that cosmological redshift is
proportional to the electrical stresses in a discharge, in
which case the measured redshift cannot reliably tell us the
distance of an event.
The mainstream's bafflement over electrical phenomena in
space cannot be resolved by ad hoc theoretical inventions
that will only be refuted again in the future. Instead of
"going back to the drawing board" to try and save failed
theories, the time is long passed for astronomers to
question WHY space discovery has so relentlessly "baffled"
them, and to seek the PATTERNS consistent in the
"surprises." When seen without ideological prejudice, these
patterns tell us one thing -- we live in an electric
universe.
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For your best gateway to the Electric Universe, see
Thunderbolts.info. And for a highly-acclaimed 60 minute video
introduction to the Electric Universe, see
Thunderbolts of the Gods on Google Video.