Best ever mainstream observations dumped in our lap

[celeste]

https://astro.uchicago.edu/~frisch/2015 ... lament.pdf

I’m hoping everyone sees the significance of this, as we couldn’t have asked for a better set of observations, and sortation of that data. (Also, a reminder that you really have to read Priscilla Frisch, if you want to understand the layout of Birkeland currents on the local interstellar scale.)

Read the very last paragraph first (“note added in proof”), and ask yourself what they are seeing.
They first found a seeming correlation between polarization angle with distance (Don Scott’s model should be screaming at you already), but then they disregard it as “spurious”, because it seemed to depend on the choice of stars (local or more distant), and coordinate system of choice.

Now, put this article in the back of your head for a minute, and ask yourself what we should see, if Don’s model is the correct way to model current filaments, but we have small scale local filaments, all inside larger scale Birkeland current filaments. I bet you’ll make the same prediction, that they in fact observed.

Let’s try it from the top: if Don Scott is right, when we look out radially from inside one of his filaments, we should see a rotating magnetic field direction. This is most apparent when we look out radially in that filament, and the effect disappears completely when we look down the filament axis. We should observe this effect when looking at local stars. But what if we are also in a larger scale filament? We should also see this rotation of magnetic field when looking out radially from this filament too. Only the rotation of magnetic field with distance will be dependent on the direction of this filament (and the coordinate system that best matches it). And it will be best mapped with a larger scale distribution of stars.

[Robertus Maximus]

“Polarization measurements of a sample of 49 nearby bright stars have been measured to accuracies about 20 to 100 times better than those of any previous measurements. In contrast to previous observations which have generally been unable to detect many polarized stars at these distances, we find significant polarization in many of the stars. The polarization increases with distance and shows much higher values at low galactic latitudes than towards the galactic pole. The distribution of polarization strongly suggests that the high polarization stars, and probably most of the lower polarization stars, are showing interstellar polarization. The results indicate that polarization measured at the parts per million level provides a very sensitive probe of the interstellar medium in the solar vicinity.

“The polarization observed near the Sun is much less than would be expected based on the polarization of distant stars, thus confirming the presence of the local cavity or bubble seen in absorption line measurements and in the soft X-ray background. Polarization shows little correlation with Ca II absorption due to warm interstellar gas. The data is not consistent with the hypothesis of Frisch (2005) that polarization in nearby stars is due to interstellar dust entrained in the heliosphere.” (my emphasis)

Organised on galactic co-ordinates! It is almost as if we are looking ‘up’ and out through the Heliotube.

Bailey. J. et al. 2010. The linear polarization of nearby bright stars measured at the parts per million level, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 405, 2570–2578 (2010)
https://arxiv.org/abs/1003.1753